There's no sort of genetic predisposition, and people who live in privileged places that make them exempt from behaving badly when the chips are down. Now Streaming Margaret Atwood: A Word After a Word After a Word is Power But he didn't he set it in small-town Florida, and suddenly it's dystopian because there's a baseline level of privilege that's being violated. And if he had set that story in Nagasaki, suddenly it's not dystopian anymore. A few decades ago, a guy named Pat Frank wrote a novel called Alas, Babylon about nuclear apocalypse.
I think sometimes when we think of dystopian, we think of the territory and what's happening, but that's not generally the vector that ends up getting called dystopian. OEA: I tend to think of it along the vector of victim rather than landscape.
But what I'm wondering is this: given the escalating climate crisis, the continuing rise of political authoritarianism, the growing wealth gap, the intensifying social divides and geopolitical tensions, have we reached the point where dystopian literature is just realism by another name? NA: The novels both of you have written have often been put into the category of dystopian literature.
Here is an excerpt of their conversation. Graeme Gibson was Margaret Atwood's partner, and he was instrumental in the creation of the Writers Union of Canada, the Writers' Trust, and PEN Canada. IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed spoke with writers Margaret Atwood and Omar El Akkad as part of theĀ inaugural PEN Graeme Gibson Talk. (Toronto International Festival of Authors ) Novelists Margaret Atwood, Omar El Akkad and IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed in conversation at Harbourfront in Toronto. So what roleĀ is left to novelists in all this? Now, of course, it's a lot closer and you are seeing immediate effects," Atwood explained, such as wildfires, floods and melting glaciers. "The bad place was always 50 years down the road. But as Atwood points out, it's a message that has been overlooked for decades, though biologists have been sounding the alarm since the 1950s. The central message he mentions is that humans need to change how we live to avoid utter disaster. "And one of the unfortunate things that happens to the truly great works of dystopian literature like 1984, like The Handmaid's Tale, is that they continually keep popping up to the top of the bestseller list because people aren't listening to the central message," said Omar El Akkad, whose own novel American War creates a dystopian near-future in which a second civil war ravages the U.S. Our world is arguably more than ever fodder for post-apocalyptic novels, which are themselves more popular than ever. Novelists like Margaret Atwood and Omar El Akkad inhabit a reality that now resembles much of their dystopian fiction: Anthrocepene pandemics, the rise of political authoritarianism and a looming climate crisis. *This episode originally aired on October 13, 2021.