Yes, Oryx and Crake Is Banned!

Oryx and Crake is the first book in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, set in a post-apocalyptic world where genetic engineering and unchecked corporate greed have nearly wiped out humanity. Snowman, possibly the last natural human alive, pieces together the story of his brilliant, dangerous friend Crake and the mysterious Oryx. The novel skewers biotech hubris, consumer culture, and the commodification of everything from animals to people. Published in 2003 by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, it was a Booker Prize finalist.

In August 2024, Utah became the first state to ban Oryx and Crake from all public schools under H.B. 29, a law that removes books statewide if three or more districts deem them “pornographic or indecent.” Atwood responded on social media by mocking the ban, noting her novel contains no actual pornography. Earlier that year, at least three large Texas school districts pulled the book from shelves. In Forsyth County, Georgia, officials didn’t ban it outright but required parental permission before students could access it. The objections center on sexual content and violence, though the book’s real power lies in how uncomfortably prophetic its corporate dystopia has become.

Why You Should Read This

Atwood wrote Oryx and Crake on a birdwatching trip to Australia, and you can feel the naturalist’s eye in every grotesque detail of her invented world. The pigoons (pig-human hybrids bred for organ harvesting), the ChickieNobs (headless chickens grown as meat products), the gated corporate compounds where scientists live in luxury while everyone else rots. She wasn’t predicting the future so much as extrapolating from what was already happening in 2003.

Twenty years later, with CRISPR gene editing, lab-grown meat, and pharmaceutical companies wielding more power than most governments, the novel reads less like fiction and more like a warning label. The fact that it got banned for sexual content misses the point entirely. The real obscenity in Oryx and Crake is how casually humans trade away their humanity for convenience and profit. That’s the conversation schools should be having, not whether a passage is too graphic for teenagers who’ve already seen worse on their phones.