![]() ![]() Oryx and Crake was a brilliant tour de force, in which two dystopias and a utopia were ingeniously intertwined. ![]() In any case it might be argued (but not here) that at this moment of time, all fiction approaches science fiction, as the future, the various futures, begin to dissolve into ever more porous actuality: and the end of the world seems to approach more rapidly than the unified world market itself. * So-called mass cultural genres, in other words, have rules and standards as rigorous and professional as the more noble forms.īut Atwood can now be considered to be a science-fiction writer, I’m happy to say, and this is not meant to disparage. And not unpredictably, the results of these efforts have been as amateurish as analogous experiments in the realm of the detective or crime story (from Dostoevsky to Nabokov, if you like), but including a message or thesis. Not coincidentally, it has also been the one science-fictional sub-genre in which more purely ‘literary’ writers have felt free to indulge: Huxley, Orwell, even the Margaret Atwood of The Handmaid’s Tale. ![]() For the most part, dystopia has been a vehicle for political statements of some kind: sermons against overpopulation, big corporations, totalitarianism, consumerism, patriarchy, not to speak of money itself. Who will recount the pleasures of dystopia? The pity and fear of tragedy – pity for the other, fear for myself – does not seem very appropriate to a form which is collective, and in which spectator and tragic protagonist are in some sense one and the same. ![]()
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