Atwood has written about Wells repeatedly in her essays on science fiction, and the Crakers are Moreau's argument carried to the end of it. Wells puts a scientist on an island making people out of animals and asks what he owes them; Atwood puts a scientist in a corporate compound making a replacement species out of people and removes the question of whether he may. Both books are most interested in the moment the creator is gone and the made beings are left to work out what they are, which is where Snowman spends the novel. The pigoons are the clearest borrowing: spliced animals with more human material in them than anybody is comfortable with, and the same slow dread about it. Filed MEDIUM because Atwood's stated lineage runs through several writers rather than one.