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clude that the whole physical book the reader is holding in her hands is actually the result of Toby’s writing down the story, owing to metatextual comments like Toby telling the young Craker Blackbeard: “‘I am writing the story,’ […] ‘The story of you and me, and the Pigoons, and everyone.”63 In spite of Crake’s ef- forts, the Crakers furthermore learn how to write and tell stories themselves, so that in the end, the narrative is taken over by Blackbeard: “This is the end of the Story of Toby. I have written it in this Book. And I have put my name here – Blackbeard – the way Toby first showed me when I was a child. It says that I was the one who set down these words.”64 Through the sometimes deliberately invented stories which first Snowman and later Toby tell the Crakers, as well as Toby’s and Blackbeard’s writing, the Crakers build up something like a common history or foundational myth, reminiscent of other foundational cultural and re- ligious texts like the Bible. They decide that this book must also be copied and continued: “another Book should be made, with the same writing as the first one. And each time a person came into the knowledge of the writing […] that one also was to make the same Book, […] at the end of the Book we should put some pages, and attach them to the Book, and write down the things that might happen after Toby was gone.”65 This marks the Crakers’ transition from an oral culture to a written culture and proposes that storytelling and symbol- ising practices are basically what makes human beings human, and that these cannot be genetically “edited out”. Again, this represents a metafictional comment on the importance of narra- tive and literature as a means to make sense of the world, or rather to make a world at all. It matters who tells the story, how it is told, with what intentions, who listens, what features in the story and what is left out for the kind of world that is created thusly, and the maps of morality it will entail. Crake’s problematic worldview and the dystopian depiction of the pre-apocalyptic capitalist world furthermore mirror what happens if the arts and humanities are almost elimi- nated or are at least “no longer central to anything”.66 By letting the Crakers turn into a book culture, Atwood emphasises the value of art and literature for any future or (post)human society. In this sense, the trilogy can itself be seen as contributing largely to an ethics for the future in the age of the Anthropocene or Capitalocene. Rather than being only “a cautionary tale” about possible future develop- ments, as the MaddAddam Trilogy is often referred to, the story is, I want to suggest, about storytelling and how stories make both (future) worlds and eth- 63 Atwood 2004, 374. 64 Atwood 2004, 390. 65 Atwood 2004, 386. 66 Atwood 2004, 227. 48 | Stephanie Bender www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 31–50