Atwood, Margaret

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Atwood

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Margaret

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2003 - 20092
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End date: 2009 × Start date: 2003 ×

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    PublicationOpen Access
    Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam #1)
    2003 - Atwood, Margaret
    Moving back and forth between a post-apocalyptic present and a pre-apocalypse past, Oryx and Crake follows a man called Snowman, formerly known as Jimmy, who might be the sole survivor of a pandemic caused by a hit drug called BlyssPluss. In a world controlled by multinational corporations deliberately isolated from the outside world through walled compounds, bioengineers have become one of the most respected members of society, growing human organs in labs or genetically engineering hybrid animals. One of these bioengineers is Snowman’s late friend Crake, originally known as Glenn, the creator of the BlyssPluss wonder pill, which was designed to improved users’ libido, while also secretly making them infertile and sick with a contagious virus. Snowman, unaware of the drug’s true purposes and of Crake’s intentions when developing it, despite helping to market it, is immune to the virus, as was Crake. While most of the world’s population has been wiped out by the BlyssPluss pandemic, Snowman becomes responsible for the Children of Crake, the genetically engineered childlike people created by Crake when he was still alive, who are not affected by the contagious virus and who walk around naked.
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    PublicationOpen Access
    The Year of the Flood (MaddAddam #2)
    2009 - Atwood, Margaret
    The second book of the MaddAddam trilogy, The Year of the Flood follows many of the events described in Oryx and Crake from the perspective of those belonging to the lower social classes and living in the “pleeblands”, located outside of the walled compounds owned by the multinational corporations that housed both Snowman and Crake. Among them are the God’s Gardeners, a vegetarian religious group that lives in a commune and that fuses biblical teachings with sustainable scientific practices, intended to preserve all forms of life. God’s Gardeners believe that there is an impending man-made catastrophe looming in the horizon, to which they refer as “The Waterless Flood”, an assumption that is partially proven right when Crake’s BlyssPluss pandemic decimates most of the world’s population. Two of the members of the God’s Gardeners, named Toby and Ren, are the main characters of the novel, and their individual stories intersect with each other and with Snowman’s and Crake’s own narratives.