Sometimes fiction is more accurate than life. The novel, Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, is a futuristic work that seems like a history lesson.
Oryx and Crake is an end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it story. The bad guys are narcissistic scientists disguised as the good guys, inventing genetic diversity to create new species to feed a strained world.
The new dysphoric world is acutely unequal—the elite and educated work for large conglomerate companies. Employees live in company-owned housing and educate their children in company-owned schools.
Those living outside the Corporate Compounds reside in the Pleeblands, filled with what Edmund Burke referred to as the "unwashed masses." The Corporations view the lower classes of the Pleeblands as consumers that keep the capitalist cycle afloat.
The once virtuous cycle turns vicious. Crake, a brilliant geneticist, comprehends the system for what it is: corrupt, exploitative, and ultimately unsustainable. Crake uses his brilliance to create a new human-like, genetically-modified species, aptly named Crakers, resilient enough to live in a Hobbesian state of nature. Combining various traits from different species leads to stranger-than-life circumstances, such as a mating ritual resembling baboons.
To bring about his utopian vision, Crake manufactures an apocalyptic virus, killing all except the Crakers within months. As Crake succumbs, he gives his best friend, Jimmy, the antidote to the virus and begs Jimmy to watch over his creation. What happens next seems ordained.
With all social institutions gone, the Crakers reinvent civilization. The Crakers establish governance hierarchies and division of labor within the group. The Crakers begin to idolize their creator to understand the world around them. Their guardian, Jimmy, now called the Snowman, becomes Crake's prophet, the only one to speak directly to the creator. In short, Crakers begin to replicate primitive human society and religion.
And so, the cycle starts again.
