The Reality behind Doomsday: A Study of Crisis Writing in Oryx and Crake

Oryx and Crake, as a typical dystopian scientific fiction, depicts incredible technology myth. Yet technology supermacy ultimately pushes human beings to the extinction during a pandemic. From the perspective of the tradition of crisis writing, this paper takes Margaret Atwood's classic dystopian novel Oryx and Crake as the object of study, and analyzes how Margaret Atwood exposes the imbalance between human beings and nature, deterioration of social institution and deprivation of humanity. She sharply criticizes the reality of contemporary western society behind the natural, technological and ethical crises throughout rich imaginations in this “revelatory” fable. On this basis, the unique aesthetic connotation of this novel is revealed.