If there’s one thing Margaret Atwood should not be wanting for, it’s credibility. As the high priestess of CanLit, she has given us 14 acclaimed novels and a towering stack of poetry, short fiction and non-fiction tomes.
Yet while chatting about her MaddAddam Trilogy — now complete with the recent publication of the third instalment, MaddAddam — Atwood is preoccupied with just that: credibility. She’s set on assuring readers and critics alike that her end-of-days scenarios are not merely mental gymnastics, but instead representations of what is possible.
“I didn’t make up anything,” says Atwood, speaking from her publisher’s office during her MaddAddam promotional blitz. “I took everything from something that either had already existed or that we could do — because otherwise people just think you’ve got a really twisted, dark imagination.”
The least credible part of this claim is that Atwood would still have any insecurity about what people think of her. But regardless, her point is that the disturbing, savage world depicted in her trilogy is far closer to our own than we’d like to believe.
As with her 1985 award-winning dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood concludes MaddAddam with an author’s note, stating that the technologies and “biobeings” in her work either already exist or, at the very least, are possible in theory.
In her bleak vision, wherein most of humanity is wiped out by a man-made plague (a deliberate terrorist attack on the authoritarian corporate state), these biobeings include survivors (science-savvy gamers, environmentalist cult members and vicious ex-cons), bioengineered quasi-humans (Crakers) and quasi-human pigs (genetically engineered pigoons).
In the wreckage of a ruined civilization, this motley crew of humans and non-humans struggles to re-establish order over whatever aspects of life they can still control.
And, as Atwood indicates, it is all very much scientifically plausible, in addition to being culturally relevant.
“I try to keep abreast, particularly of developments in biotechnology, which interest me more than, say, the edges of the universe,” she says.
“It’s closer to home and could affect us.” (This love of science is in Atwood’s genes: Her father was a zoologist, her mother a nutritionist.)
Her curiosity about pop science phenomena helps Atwood flesh out the bizarre particulars of her speculative fiction, such as the bioengineered Crakers’ insect-repellent skin.
“That came out of all this research that people were doing about substances that — if you ate them — made mosquitoes less interested in you,” she explains, delighting in the particulars. “Some people say citrus fruit; other people say various B vitamins. It turns out, one of the things they’re really attracted to is carbon dioxide, so when you stop breathing, mosquitoes cease to be interested in you.”
From there, it isn’t much of a stretch to say that insect-repellent skin might very well be in the works at a lab near you. Likewise, instances in the novel of animal-human co-operation are well-founded (although certain MaddAddam animals do happen to have human cortex tissue implants). As evidence, Atwood cites the obvious example of human-canine partnerships and then less-obvious cases like the co-operation between ravens and hunters, reasoning that “any social animal is potentially an animal with whom one might possibly find oneself co-operating,” she explains. “It happens a lot, when you come to think of it.”
Strangely, it’s probably the virtual world of MaddAddam that most closely replicates our own (virtual) reality.
Atwood delves deeply into the dark corners of the online universe where, in a back story, several characters hack their way across corporate and government firewalls and use intricate online games as a means of hiding encoded messages.
The great information highway is characterized only by the porousness and inadequacy of its barriers.
“That’s not fiction at all. That is what the Internet is like, as we now know,” says Atwood, who takes no credit for the prescience of her vision of online surveillance (given the recent revelations about the National Security Agency).
“I felt that that was something everybody should have known already. I went to a panel a while ago, put on by an outfit that’s right in Toronto, called the Citizen Lab, who specialize in this. They began by saying, ‘So this panel is about Internet safety,’ and then they started to laugh. And those were the experts.”
Although the hackers in MaddAddam are rightly paranoid, Atwood has a pragmatic, authorial approach to her own present-day web participation (and participate she does: at 73, she’s a prolific tweeter with more than 420,000 followers).
“Information that you put on Twitter is publication,” she says.
“I think, when people get worried about breaches of Internet security, it’s when they find that things they did not intend to have public are suddenly all over the place. So the advice generally is, if you don’t want it leaked, don’t put it there in the first place.”
Solid advice, and it follows that, if you do hope to spread the word about something, the Internet is an ideal forum.
This is why Atwood enthusiastically assented when software developers pitched Intestinal Parasites, a computer game based on a game played by a MaddAddam character.
“I’m eager to play it,” she says. “I’m told that even a person with rudimentary game-playing skills, such as myself, ought to be able to master the lower levels of it.”
Ever the forward-thinker, Atwood then makes some projections for the future.
“Couple that with the information that playing video games improves cognitive abilities in old people … just think of that. We could have millions of old people playing Intestinal Parasites!”
