The companies had operated by developing and marketing advanced technology products such as medical treatments and genetically engineered hybrid animals, but now no other humans are evident, and the compounds have become decaying ruins.

Near starvation, Snowman decides to return to the ruins of a compound named RejoovenEsense to search for supplies, even though his excursion risks encountering dangers including feral populations of the hybridized animals.

Jimmy and Crake spend much of their leisure time playing online games, smoking "skunkweed", and watching underground videos such as live executions, graphic surgery, Noodie News, frog squashing, and child pornography.

Crake uses his prominent position to create the Crakers, peaceful, gentle, herbivorous humanoids, who have sexual intercourse only during limited polyandrous breeding seasons.

His stated purpose for the Crakers, actually a deliberate deception, is to create "floor models" of all the possible options a family could choose in the genetic manipulation of their future children.

Crake tells Jimmy about another very important project, a Viagra-like super-pill called BlyssPluss, which also promises health and happiness, but secretly causes sterilization in order to address overpopulation.

After Crake's wonder drug BlyssPluss is widely distributed, a global pandemic breaks out and begins wiping out the human race and causing mass chaos outside of the protected Rejoov compound.

However, Atwood explained that the work was also a product of her lingering thoughts on such a scenario throughout her life, as well as spending a great amount of time with scientists throughout her childhood.

She stated Several of my close relatives are scientists, and the main topic at the annual family Christmas dinner is likely to be intestinal parasites or sex hormones in mice, or, when that makes the non-scientists too queasy, the nature of the Universe.

The French translation of the title to "Le dernier homme" (The Last Man) is an allusion to Mary Shelley's work of the same name, both set in the apocalyptic genre as a plague results in the near-extinction of humanity.

In the first chapter, Snowman utters a reference from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five: "It is the strict adherence to daily routine that tends towards the maintenance of good morale and the preservation of sanity," he says out loud.

He has the feeling he's quoting from a book, some obsolete, ponderous directive written in aid of European colonials running plantations of one kind or another.One of Snowman's musings, "Now I'm alone [...] All, all alone.

[13] The Globe and Mail, Maclean's, and the Toronto Star ranked the novel high among Atwood's works and Helen Brown, for the Daily Telegraph, wrote "The bioengineered apocalypse she imagines is impeccably researched and sickeningly possible: a direct consequence of short-term science outstripping long-term responsibility.

The book proceeds from terrifying grimness, through lonely mournfulness, until, midway, a morbid silliness begins sporadically to assert itself, like someone, exhausted by bad news, hysterically succumbing to giggles at a funeral.

[22] In January 2018, Paramount Television and Anonymous Content announced they had won the bidding war for rights to the trilogy and planned to bring the series to cable or video on demand.

[24][23] Oryx and Crake is one of the most-banned books by school officials in the United States due to its adult themes and occasional pornographic material.

[28] Officials in Forsyth County, Georgia did not ban Oryx and Crake but did decide to require parental permission before a student could access it.

"[31][32] In 2024 the book was banned in Texas by the Katy Independent School District on the basis that the novel is "adopting, supporting, or promoting gender fluidity"[33] despite also pronouncing a bullying policy that protects infringements on the rights of the student.

Though chronicling a different set of characters, the follow-up expands upon and clarifies the relationships of Crake with Oryx and Jimmy with his high school girlfriend Ren.

[35] In 2023, the Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden premiered an opera based on the novel, composed by Søren Nils Eichberg, conducted by Albert Horne and directed by Daniela Kerck.