ABSTRACT
If there is one common strain in utopian thought across the ages, it is that there is a finite—quite small, in fact—set of principles that all rational citizens would agree on. As a literary utopia, as a behaviourist blueprint for new society, and as a recipe for a kinder and gentler America, Skinner’s Walden Two is rooted in radical associationism. The future in Oryx and Crake is one of bioengineering, transgenic animals, and designer-genes posthumans. Human life is fully commodified and corporatized. The climax comes right from Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys—another retro-futuresque in which a scientist-environmentalist-bioterrorist releases a superbug to rid the Earth of its deadliest species. Oryx and Crake is a great novel, maybe Atwood’s best in her more than half a century long career. It is also a great utopian novel, precisely because it sticks a big lurid price sticker on deaggression.
