Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, our theme song has a rather special application.

My guest is Margaret Atwood.

Her novel is Oryx and Crake.

It's published by Doubleday.

And it's a remarkable novel of the end of a world in which the question of what is a special breed becomes almost too complicated to begin to answer.

There are invented breeds in the book who are the products of gene splicing.

There are stories and mythologies about new races.

In particular, I think the book is a satire, something that the reviewers of the book seem to be unaware of.

They notice comedy, but satire seems very strange.

And the first question I want to ask, because this is, he may well be the last or one of the last humans, your narrator,

Jimmy, now known as Snowman.

And I wanted to know how you chose him, what kind of person you wanted to be the last human.

Well, your protagonists are not chosen by you, as you know very well.

They choose you.

And I could have, I suppose, made him more of a Boy Scout, you know, more capable of living in a tree and making fire by rubbing two sticks

together and what have you, but he's just not. He wasn't brought up that way. So, and I didn't want

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