This dissertation focuses on Margaret Atwood's work Oryx and Crake. Its aim is to define the book as a heir to the dystopian genre, yet showing its specificity with regard to other more well-known dystopian works, such as Orwell's, Huxley's or Zamyatin's. Claiming her work to be a "speculative fiction", Margaret Atwood transcends the tradition by writing a work in which each aspect is connected with varying degrees to reality. The second point of analysis at stake in this dissertation is the manipulation, studied through different angles: the genetic manipulation, the manipulation of language, the manipulation in the relationships and the manipulation at the heart of the society itself. The purpose of this work is therefore to show not only how Oryx and Crake is part of the dystopian tradition, but also to define it as an innovative book, whose impact on the reader, because of its verisimilitude and accuracy, is to give a disturbing assessment of our modern society to him, in order to make him question the world that surrounds him.