Tag Archives: Oryx and Crake

March Has Come in Like a Liobam

By Robin Bates | Published: March 2, 2023

What do you have when March comes in as both a lion AND a lamb. Thanks to Margaret Atwood, we have liobams.

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Sci-Fi Provides Pandemic Guidance

By Robin Bates | Published: April 20, 2020

Our society is currently split on the value of scientific expertise. That split goes back at least as far as Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.”

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Atwood’s Novels in the News

By Robin Bates | Published: December 13, 2017

Atwood’s unsettling predictions registered two hits this past week: a GOP Congressman pressuring assistants to be surrogate mothers and recent reports of pigs engineered to carry human organs.

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Rakunks & Wolvogs & Pigoons, Oh My!

By Robin Bates | Published: April 13, 2017

As gene splicing becomes more common, we need novels like Margaret Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake” to point out the dangers. By making connections, good dystopian fiction serves to wakes us up.

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Atwood vs. Unregulated Capitalism

By Robin Bates | Published: June 9, 2014

Atwood’s dystopian novel is about a future of unregulated high tech capitalism.

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Atwood and the Eve of Destruction

By Robin Bates | Published: September 20, 2010

Margaret Atwood’s most famous novel may be her futurist nightmare The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). In her two most recent novels, Atwood returns to the dystopian genre and paints a picture of a world in which unbridled capitalism, environmental devastation, urban decay, sexual license, runaway gene splicing, and extreme income disparity rule the earth. My book […]

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