When reading Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, I notice that from Snowman’s point of view, we are seeing through a lifeless future, a person who is struggling with no money, no home, and no memory. Atwood doesn’t reveal everything at once; she just gives down the world in parts of Snowman’s now and flashes back to his past. It’s an interesting, but also kind of putting, passage. Instead of the future being simply peaceful with no harm, Atwood leads us to consider that maybe Earth is on the verge of becoming a wasteland, since humans are no longer the dominant species. Here, there’s not even enough time (Atwood 1), but all that is human-made has become irrelevant.

Survival, however, is difficult. Snowman spends most of his time looking for food and not getting killed. He was so lonely that he talked to himself to have company. These struggles show how messy life can be, even with the technology and conveniences we still pursue. Almost as if Atwood is warning us all about what happens when science is unrestricted and corporate greed runs rampant. The main creation was the pigoon, which is a type of pig that could replace organs with humans  (Attwood 23-24). And while this is the kind of technology that could be a matter of life and death, what’s really at stake here isn’t lives so much as profits. During the fight between Jimmy’s parents, we can tell that these companies don’t plan to help people but rather want to make more money (Atwood 56-57). Atwood has created this world to show a world that has big companies and money hungry people making decisions that lead society to be torn apart. Another theme is memory.  They’re sometimes real, and then again, they seem murky.  For Snowman, his memories are the only connection to the others, but he is not sure about himself, not knowing who he is.

At the end, Oryx and Crake is not a story about how the future turned into a wasteland. It is a story about the dangers and consequences of human wants and needs, and how easily life can be lost in that way, which could lead you to start from the beginning. Atwood really puts these issues front and center, showing issues of global problems that turn the story into a reality that mirrors ours and could give us a warning about our world, and to give us a choice in our decision-making, whether what we make is the right choice or not.

When reading chapter 4, “The Novel” by Astrid Bracke, Bracke asks a major question that puts me in a spot that I can’t seem to answer. Which is can novels still matter when we’re facing something as huge as climate? When discussing this question, many critics have argued against it. One critic, Timothy Clark, argues that “The vast temporal and spatial scales of climate crisis cannot be captured in conventional narrative forms such as novels.” (Bracke 88). In other words, what he is saying is that climate change is too big in time and space for novels to capture. However, Brarakes points out that novels like flood fictions can help people understand what it feels like to live through climate change. Briefly, the critics are convinced. Amitav Ghosh, another famous critic, claimed that ” the genre’s development in precisely that period when the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere here was rewriting the destiny of history”(Bracke 88). Which means that the novel was used around the rise of fuels, so it will probably be tied to the problems that caused the crisis. But Bracke shows that leaving behind the novel would underestimate its resilience. Adam Trexler, a literary scholar, reminds us that the “imaginative capacities of the novel have made it a vital site for the articulation of the Anthropocene” (Bracke 89). Making it clear that novels may not solve climate change, but they make us feel like we’re there to witness it.                                                                                                                                                            Bracke’s case study of flood fiction was very inspiring, and works like Clare Morrall’s “When the Floods Came and Antonia Honeywell’s ” The Ship ” where they don’t just describe disaster, they simulate it. In Antonia Honeywell’s The Ship, the main character, Lalage, starts to blame the early generation, where she said,” at the stupidty of the generations before mine that had brought us to this place” (Bracke 92). This kind of writing draws more on what people see today as the past than the future will judge. It shows climate change as more personal than global.  These novels tell a perspective on families. In Clare Morrall’s When the Floods Came, Roza’s family lives in separation after the disaster. Bracke argues that this helps focus on readers connect emotionally. However, I feel that it could be limiting when it risks keeping the attention of humans and ignoring nonhuman life that is just as affected. In the end, the novel isn’t a weakness, but that’s what makes it powerful. A still image or an ice core can show us climate data, but also can make us feel a bit of fear and grief, and hope. Bracke shows us how the novel isn’t dead but rather may be one of the tools to imagine how to live in an Anthropocene.