“It’s Game Over Forever”: Atwood’s Satiric Vision of a Bioengineered Posthuman Future in Oryx and Crake

Abstract

In a biotechnological world in which the “boundaries between science fiction and science fact are fast collapsing”, corporations can own, patent, and commodify technologically designed species, and while some scientists are attempting to clone human beings, “others imagine concocting chimeras that are half-human, half-ape for medical and experimental purposes”.2 If the “postmodern adventure” in science “strives to overcome all known limits, subverting boundaries such as those that demarcate species”, it also “steers us into an alleged ‘age of biological control’”.3 Moreover, even as a heedless “gene rush” is now underway, the genetic sciences, write Best and Kellner, all too often exhibit “a dangerous one-dimensional, reductionist mind-set that is blind to the social and historical context of science and to the ethical and ecological “It’s Game Over Forever”