MADDADDAM

In the aftermath of a global pandemic, a traumatised Snowman/Jimmy believes he is the last human being alive. He has led the Crakers – a peace-loving new race of hominid engineered by his one-time best friend Crake – out of the Paradice Dome, where they were created, and into the newly depopulated world. Feeling himself to be an interloper among Crake’s perfect people, he has dubbed himself ‘Snowman’ after the Abominable Snowman. He is haunted by fragments of memory about Crake and also the beautiful Oryx, Crake’s partner and the love of Jimmy’s life. Both are now dead.

Meanwhile, there are other survivors: Toby, a former member of the eco-pacifist God’s Gardeners, who hopes her friends may also be alive, especially her secret love, Zeb; Ren, an exotic dancer; Amanda, an artist and Ren’s best friend; and the Painballers, a group of violent criminals led by Toby’s former abuser, Blanco, who have escaped incarceration in the aftermath of the wipe-out.

A game of extinction and survival inspired by the computer game played by Crake and Jimmy as teenagers. As players ‘choose their skins’, we see the communities that inhabited the pre-apocalyptic dystopian world. The God’s Gardeners create their own sanctuary where Adam, their leader, preaches against materialism. Scientists play god, the violent CorpseCorps suppress dissent, and the MADDADDAM resistance disrupt. Time scrolls forward and back as encounters between players show glimpses of characters’ past lives in the years before the wipe-out. Amidst it all, Crake has a vision of a better world and creates first the Crakers and then the BlyssPluss pill – a drug that induces euphoria, but also contains the virus that will destroy humanity in the catastrophe that the Gardeners have foretold as the ‘Waterless Flood’. At the climax of the game, the fates of Oryx, Crake and Jimmy are decided, and Act II ends where Act I began.

In the future, some generations after the Waterless Flood, the brave new world is peopled by evolved Crakers – the result of cross-breeding between Crake’s new hominids and the homo sapiens survivors of the wipe-out. As Crake had hoped, the Crakers live in harmony with nature and each other. Even romantic rivalry has been programmed out of them and reproduction occurs seasonally in a communal ritual. Yet, whilst Crake had tried to rid his species of symbolic thinking, the Crakers now honour their human ancestors through creating effigies and enacting fragments of their histories. The stories that were told to them first by Jimmy, and later by Toby, have evolved into the beginnings of a scripture in which Oryx and Crake are deities. And among the artefacts that have been preserved from the old world is a gun.