But what would that really mean in practice? By genetically engineering people with different sexual instincts modeled on other species, it might be possible to eliminate the competition, the proprietary feelings, the jealousy, the heartache, and other aspects of human interpersonal relationships. Most of us think we can envisage a better world than the one in which we find ourselves. As we learn through flashbacks that explain the events prior to the story’s beginning, Crake believed he could make a better world, and better human beings. The simplicity of the so-called “Crakers” and the mythology of their origins Jimmy weaves for them raise questions about the nature of our humanity. His man-made virus wiped out most of the population of naturally-evolved humans. An individual nicknamed Crake genetically engineered them before unleashing a “waterless flood” on the world. There are other people, but they are not like Jimmy in ways and for reasons that soon become clear. For all he knows, he is the last human being alive - at least, the last human being of his kind, of our kind. The first book in the trilogy, Oryx and Crake, drops the reader into an imagined future and into the mind of the central character, Jimmy. Her distant future is similar enough to our present to make us wonder not just whether humanity’s future might one day resemble the world depicted in the story, but whether it could happen within our lifetime.

Margaret Atwood’s dystopian MaddAddam trilogy explores the human potential to use science to redefine what it means to be human - or pig for that matter - and to explore what the collapse of society would mean for a humanity that has become dependent on technology. James McGrath on Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Triology Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), MaddAddam (2013), 378-448-416 pp., $15.95-15.95-27.95

Maddaddam trilogy by margaret atwood