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ism” and that therefore The Year of the Flood should be understood as a “cau- tionary tale about cautionary tales” in ecocritical movements.47 I would ques- tion this reading by arguing that the Gardeners represent not “inhumanism” but a step towards “posthumanism”, and that their portrayal and especially To- by’s immersion into their creed are depicted very positively by the novels.48 By foregrounding the narrative constructedness of the Gardeners’ belief system, Atwood emphasises that it is the stories that determine the action, in this case the distinctive behaviour of Gardeners towards the natural world. Even though Toby is emotionally distanced from the Gardeners’ world in the beginning, she becomes a real Gardener by first acting “as if” she believes, before fully internal- ising the Gardeners creed and habits. She even keeps them up throughout her isolation during plague and carries them over into the post-apocalyptic setting. The last part of the trilogy, MaddAddam, consequently ends with the teachings of the Gardeners being successfully passed on to the Crakers. Similar to the Gardeners’ teachings and believes, Crake’s map of morality stands in opposition to the capitalist map, yet is heavily indebted to a purely scientific worldview and its essentialism. While it is typical of (post-)apocalyptic fiction in recent years that the catastrophe is of anthropogenic origin (e. g. a nu- clear incident in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, climate change in The Day after Tomorrow), the MaddAddam Trilogy’s apocalyptic event is still an exception, as it is caused deliberately by Crake to solve the problem of human-made eco- logical destruction. It is therefore fuelled by good intentions, echoing the idea of human extinction as a new utopia. As Crake furthermore bioengineers the Crakers, who are meant to survive the plague, the parallels to the Biblical apoc- alyptic story become more obvious: the end of humankind and its late mod- ern form of civilisation, which is rendered as morally debauched in the novels, becomes the beginning of a better posthuman world – at least from Crake’s point of view. Instead of God, however, it is Crake as an ordinary human be- ing who has put himself into a God-like position by bringing on the apocalypse, self-righteously reigning over life and death: “Sitting in judgement of the world, thought Jimmy; but why had that been his right?”49 The consequences of not asking about rights is often thematised in representations of the scientific be- lief in “progress” and mastery in science fiction, starting with Mary Shelley’s Franken stein.50 In this early science-fiction novel, a scientific experiment to arti- 47 Jennings 2010, 11;14. 48 Again, reading the last part of the trilogy leads to conclusions than are not that same as when one looks at The Year of the Flood alone. 49 Atwood 2004, 406. 50 Some scholars define Frankenstein as an important forerunner of science fiction in the form of scientific romance (e. g. Parrinder 2015, 40), while others follow Brian Aldiss’s claim (see Aldiss 1973) that Frankenstein is actually the ur-text of all science fiction (e. g. Alkon 1994). 44 | Stephanie Bender www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 31–50