When does this series take place?

[Marks54]

Mid 21st century or later I would guess.

[Felicity]

Late 21st Century. This is mentioned when Zeb wears "a Steampunk retro bowler from the 2010s.....the start of the century". I see it as a long term extrapolation of the world we live in now, as opposed to The Handmaid's Tale which was from the world of the 1980s.

[Hotrats]

Too soon. It's so possible even probable in the near future.

[Marcy]

I just got this book today, haven't even started it yet. But the whole series I believe takes place some time in the near future, say, 2030.

[Aisling]

On the basis that most of what she proposes in the book, gene splicing and multiple species extinction & climate change, is either currently happening or in development I imagine probably 25-35 years in the future!

[Georgiana]

I'd say that the post-apocalyptic bits are meant to be about 60 years into the future, perhaps a little more. Zeb's probably meant to be in his forties or fifties by then, and in the flashbacks to his childhood, technology and society have already moved on a lot from where we are now.

But I definitely don't see it as one of those "thousands of years in the future" type stories. Must of the scariest changes are developments and exaggerations of current technological and societal norms, not completely invented developments.

The weird think is that Oryx and Crake was first published about ten years ago, and some things have already moved on since then. I found it strange that the characters in that book use old CD-roms - I don't think my current laptop can read them. Or that the Crakers found a computer mouse with a long tail, when increasingly, most of the are wireless. Scary that technology moves faster even than people imagining a worse case scenario.