The author talks about "MaddAddam," how technology affects our lives, and being dubbed "Queen of the Nerds"
Margaret Atwood (Credit: Reuters/Mark Blinch)
Since winning the 2000 Booker Prize for “The Blind Assassin,” the perennially Nobel-tipped Margaret Atwood has devoted most of her writing career to that literary black sheep, science fiction. She’d prefer we call her writing “speculative fiction” (in a move dismissed by Ursula K. Le Guin as “designed to protect her novels from being relegated to a genre still shunned by hidebound readers, reviewers and prize-awarders”); regardless, it’s clear that the author of “The Handmaid’s Tale” (1985) is still fond of a good dystopia. This past May, she wrapped up her Orwellian Web serial, “Positron,” on Byliner.com, and her just-published novel, “MaddAddam,” concludes a hefty near-future trilogy that started with “Oryx and Crake” (2003) and “The Year of the Flood” (2009).
The trilogy concerns “the Waterless Flood”: the mass extinction of humanity brought about by the rogue geneticist Crake so that his creations, the Crakers (like humans, but idealized pacifists), may inherit the Earth. A few humans survive, eking out a parlous existence in a rundown world; by the end, they’re repurposing bedsheets as clothes. At the center of “MaddAddam” is Zeb, a leather-jacket-wearing, wisecracking outlaw hacker who becomes a patriarch in a doomsday cult that, fittingly enough, ends up well prepared to survive the Flood.
Zeb also makes up bawdy songs, and despite the book’s bleakness, it’s often very funny. So, too, is Atwood herself. On a sunny summer day, she’s curled up with a coffee in a corner of a cafe near her Toronto home to meet journalists; she has a perpetual quarter-smile, an amused stare, and the deadpan air of a raconteur whose disconcerting tales are laced with dark humor. In SF, she has found a form that suits her voracious reading and the breadth of her interests. “MaddAddam” alone takes up religion, education, evolution, punishment and ubiquitous government surveillance. As I put my recorder down in front of her, she says, “It can join all the other little devices that are circling over our heads.” She looks up to the sky. “Hello! Enjoy the interview!”
More
The trilogy concerns “the Waterless Flood”: the mass extinction of humanity brought about by the rogue geneticist Crake so that his creations, the Crakers (like humans, but idealized pacifists), may inherit the Earth. A few humans survive, eking out a parlous existence in a rundown world; by the end, they’re repurposing bedsheets as clothes. At the center of “MaddAddam” is Zeb, a leather-jacket-wearing, wisecracking outlaw hacker who becomes a patriarch in a doomsday cult that, fittingly enough, ends up well prepared to survive the Flood.
Zeb also makes up bawdy songs, and despite the book’s bleakness, it’s often very funny. So, too, is Atwood herself. On a sunny summer day, she’s curled up with a coffee in a corner of a cafe near her Toronto home to meet journalists; she has a perpetual quarter-smile, an amused stare, and the deadpan air of a raconteur whose disconcerting tales are laced with dark humor. In SF, she has found a form that suits her voracious reading and the breadth of her interests. “MaddAddam” alone takes up religion, education, evolution, punishment and ubiquitous government surveillance. As I put my recorder down in front of her, she says, “It can join all the other little devices that are circling over our heads.” She looks up to the sky. “Hello! Enjoy the interview!”
More
No comments:
Post a Comment