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  Future shocking November 16, 2003 Producer : Marianne Latham  If Canadian writer Margaret Atwood's storytelling is to be believed, we have a horrific future ahead of us. In her latest book Oryx and Crake, she has created a frightening world where grotesque animals called pigoons are bred for organ and tissue transplants, genetically-engineered headless chickens called ChickieNobs are bred as convenience food and deadly viruses are manufactured for profit. Three years ago Atwood won the Booker Prize for her book The Blind Assassin, a fictitious story set in the 1930s and '40s. Her previous book Alias Grace was set a century earlier, based on a true murder that took place in Canada. However, her current book is a fictional, bleak, cautionary tale of the future we will face if science and profit-making gets into the wrong hands. This isn't Margaret Atwood's first foray into a speculative future. In 1985 she wrote The Handmaid's Tale, about the futuristic Republic of Gilead where women are strictly controlled and assigned to various classes: childless commanding wives, bossy housekeepers and reproductive handmaids. It's a book about anti-feminist, moralistic, religious fanatics controlling the lives of those they deem to be morally unfit. It was made into a popular film, an opera and there is even talk of a ballet. Oryx and Crake is about the world itself coming physically under threat from an unholy alliance between scientists and those who aim to profit from the proceeds of scientific discovery. A pill called BlyssPlus is developed that not only acts as a contraceptive, but ensures the fountain of youth. Unfortunately it contains another component, which has the capacity to create plagues never dreamed of.  Crake's experiments in bioengineering, which has caused humanity's demise, is an uncanny reminder of SARS, Ebola, and mad cow disease. In Oryx and Crake, Atwood has concocted a grim, prophesy as a wake-up call to the potentially-devastating consequences of modern bio-technology. And in her case, life did imitate art."Oryx and Crake hit the bookstores in Canada about a week before SARS became a big story," she says. "So there I was on a book tour of Canada with people saying 'what about SARS' and I had to say 'I didn't do it'. It's not a publicity stunt on the part of the publisher". Atwood began writing the novel in March, 2001, while on a tour of Australia promoting her previous novel The Blind Assassin. While travelling north with her husband and some friends, she visited a monsoon rainforest. She says, "It was while looking at the red-necked crakes scuttling about in the underbrush that Oryx and Crake appeared to me almost in its entirety. I began making notes on it that night." Margaret Atwood is the daughter of an entomologist, so is already versed in the world of science. She says, "Of course, nothing comes out of nothing. I'd been thinking about 'what if' scenarios almost all my life. I grew up among scientists". Margaret says that like The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake is speculative fiction, not science fiction. "It contains no intergalactic space travel, no teleportation, no Martians. As with The Handmaid's Tale, it invents nothing we haven't already invented or started to invent. Every novel begins with a 'what if' and then sets forth its axioms. The 'what if' of Oryx and Crake is simply, what if we continue down the road we're already on? How slippery is the slope? What are our saving graces? Who's got the will to stop us?"  "I think she is the novelist of ideas" says Professor Louise Adler from Melbourne University Publishing. "Some might view her as a tendentious or a didactic novelist, I think she has a set of problems that she wrestles with. I think she's highly intellectualised and I think she's an intellectual at work as a masterful fiction writer."Margaret Atwood is Canada's most popular author. There is a Margaret Atwood Society, university courses to study her work and she has just been announced as this year's winner of the Giller Prize, Canada's premier award for fiction. But she's not only popular in her own country. Her books have been translated into over 30 different languages in 35 different countries and she is without doubt one of the best-loved novelists in the world. |
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