To other works
The cover of some editions contains a portion of the left panel of Hieronymous Bosch's painting The Garden of Earthly Delights. The cover of other editions contains a modified portion of Lucas Cranach the Elder's painting The Fall.
The French translation of the title to "Le dernier homme" (The Last Man) is an allusion to Mary Shelley's work of the same name, both set in the apocalyptic genre as a plague results in the near-extinction of humanity.
In the first chapter, Snowman utters a reference from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five:
"It is the strict adherence to daily routine that tends towards the maintenance of good morale and the preservation of sanity," he says out loud. He has the feeling he's quoting from a book, some obsolete, ponderous directive written in aid of European colonials running plantations of one kind or another.
One of Snowman's musings, "Now I'm alone [...] All, all alone. Alone on a wide, wide sea"[11] is an allusion to part four of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner.[12]
In chapter 5 (subsection "Bottle") is "Out, out, brief candle" from Shakespeare's Macbeth.
Crake finds, as Hamlet does, that his father was probably killed by his mother and step father. Like Hamlet, he plots to avenge him.
To scientific history
The book alludes to green fluorescent protein multiple times. The Children of Crake are described having green eyes from a jellyfish protein, indicating that Crake used this gene in their creation. Green rabbits are wild animals in this world, alluding to Alba, a rabbit created by the scientist Louis-Marie Houdebine with the gfp gene in order to glow green.[13]
