Double Consciousness and Speculative Worlds in Oryx and Crake

This chapter explores the interaction between the latent text-worlds that form Oryx and Crake (Atwood in Oryx and Crake, 1st ed., Virago, London, 2003). Set in a post-apocalyptic near-future, this latency is cued up in the novel’s world-building and in the continued and layered processes of conceptual comparison it engenders. Through analysis of a sample of 100 reader reviews, and of key extracts from the opening and the close of the novel, this chapter argues that the readerly experience of plausibility and the resonant effects of reading, as suggested through lingering what if questions noted by the reviewers, is invited by the ‘double consciousness’ (Snyder in Studies in the Novel 43:470–489, 2011, 470) inherent in speculative world creation.