When you think about authors who have excelled in post apocalyptic fiction, who comes to mind?
Well, there’s Stephen King whose The Stand is probably the first thing that pops to my mind. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road made a big splash in the genre. Robert McCammon’s Swan Song, while not as well-known as The Stand is equally as entertaining. And, of course, Margaret Atwood.
Margaret Atwood?
Yes, Margaret Atwood. You might be more enlightened a reader than I, but it took me far too long to discover Atwood’s works. Her stories are sometimes dystopian, sometimes post-apocalyptic, and sometimes show hints of both. But they’re told in a way that they keep their humanity.
Her last novel, Oryx and Crake, followed a character as he attempts to reconcile himself with the loss of his best friend and a reclusive woman whom they both loved, in a world decimated by a massive plague.
Today, Atwood returns to what she describes as “the same time-slice” to tell a different tale from the newly decimated (and thus reborn) world. No, the characters from Oryx and Crake are not featured, instead we have a new cast and a new set of challenges. In Year of the Flood we are introduced to Adam One, leader of God’s Gardeners, a group devoted to the melding of science and religion, as well as the preservation of all plant and animal life. Adam One has been expecting a disaster of the magnitude of the plague for quite some time, but that doesn’t mean he’s ready for it when it happens. Meanwhile, Ren, a young trapeze dancer, and Toby, a God’s Gardener, have survived but are barricaded in different locations (and for different reasons, entirely).
But who else has survived? Friends? Powerful and corrupt enemies? And how do these people fit into a world that’s been changed not only in terms of population, but genetically as well?
Ms. Atwood was featured in a recent New York Times article (”Back to the Scary Future and the Best-Seller List”, Sept. 22, 2009) in which she discussed her book and her approach to writing apocalyptic science fiction. Here is a quick snippet of the article and what she said:
What is scary, Ms. Atwood said, is that her futuristic tales — she calls them speculative fiction — showcase scenarios that spring from current realities: the creep of corporations into many aspects of society, environmental decay, high-tech reproduction, the widening cleavage between haves and have-nots.
“I don’t write about Planet X, I write about where we are now,” said Ms. Atwood, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize for “The Blind Assassin.” She is probably best known for the now classic feminist parable “The Handmaid’s Tale,” published in the mid-’80s and set in a future right-wing theocracy.
On some level, I find that refreshing. In fact, if you stop and think about it long enough—and you might not want to—the realistic approach is a little more terrifying than injecting the world with things that go bump in the night.
Hear me out, I loved The Stand and Swan Song, two of the more popular post apocalypse novels, but they do have quite a bit of the fantastic working in the foreground. What’s refreshing, so to speak, about books like Year of the Flood and The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s bleak post apocalyptic vision, is that they recognize that there’s enough drama and conflict left in the real debris of the event that they don’t need to create additional monsters. The survival instinct and the shock of what has happened will be enough to supply real ones.
But life isn’t just survival and hard times. There’s humor, there’s excitement, there’s a whole range of emotion and experience and if Margaret Atwood’s books excel anywhere, it’s that she never seems to forget this. The result is a world different from our own, that’s moved on from us, but one in which we can still find our way.
Would you like to listen to a preview of Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood? Check out the widget below.
Margaret Atwood will be Twittering from the road as she tours for Year of the Flood. You can follow her at @MargaretAtwood.
You should also check out YearOfTheFlood.com, where you can nominate people to be God’s Gardeners’ Saints, find sheet music for God’s Garnders Hymns, as well as a book tour blog and a plethora of other materials.
