Oryx and Crake is a novel by the Canadian

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

 author Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Eleanor Atwood, is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She is among the most-honoured authors of fiction in recent history; she is a winner of the Arthur C...

. Atwood has at times disputed the novel being science fiction, preferring to label it speculative fiction

Speculative fiction

Speculative fiction is an umbrella term encompassing the more fantastical fiction genres, specifically science fiction, fantasy, horror, supernatural fiction, superhero fiction, utopian and dystopian fiction, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, and alternate history in literature as well as...

 and "adventure romance

Romance (genre)

As a literary genre of high culture, romance or chivalric romance is a style of heroic prose and verse narrative that was popular in the aristocratic circles of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe. They were fantastic stories about marvel-filled adventures, often of a knight errant portrayed as...

" because it does not deal with 'things that have not been invented yet' and goes beyond the realism

Realism (arts)

Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...

 she associates with the novel form. Oryx and Crake was first published by McClelland and Stewart

McClelland and Stewart

McClelland & Stewart Limited is a Canadian publishing company. It is partially owned by Random House of Canada, now a subsidiary of Bertelsmann....

 in 2003 and was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize

Man Booker Prize

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of the Commonwealth of Nations, Ireland, or Zimbabwe. The winner of the Man Booker Prize is generally assured of international renown and...

 for Fiction that same year.

The events of Atwood's The Year of the Flood

The Year of the Flood

The Year of the Flood is a novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, released on September 22, 2009 in the United States, and September 7, 2009, in the United Kingdom...

(2009) are contemporaneous with those of Oryx and Crake and contain some of the same characters.
Returning to the dystopic

Dystopia

A dystopia is the idea of a society in a repressive and controlled state, often under the guise of being utopian, as characterized in books like Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four...

 themes of Atwood's earlier novel The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale is a dystopian novel, a work of science fiction or speculative fiction, written by Canadian author Margaret Atwood and first published by McClelland and Stewart in 1985...

, Oryx and Crake presents a very different scenario than that novel's theocracy

Theocracy

Theocracy is a form of organization in which the official policy is to be governed by immediate divine guidance or by officials who are regarded as divinely guided, or simply pursuant to the doctrine of a particular religious sect or religion....

.