Margaret Atwood grew up in the Canadian wilderness, in a family of scientists. Educated at the University of Toronto, Radcliffe College and Harvard, she has been a lecturer in English in Canada, the US and Australia. Her work now appears on syllabuses around the world. She takes science seriously: palaeontology, genetics, technology and the problems of knowledge itself are sown into her 30-plus books. These include Alias Grace, The Handmaid鈥檚 Tale and Booker prize-winner The Blind Assassin.
You taught Kafka to engineers in British Columbia. Why?
Kafka鈥檚 parables often have a conundrum embedded in them. The engineers liked the puzzle aspect. Also the parables are often just a couple of paragraphs long, so I got them to write down conundrums. It was something that interested them and that they could do, whereas if I had asked them to write a Shakespearean sonnet we would have been in a lot more trouble. Conundrums appeal to the problem-solving mind. A lot of them are insoluble, of course, but they could then express their own insoluble problems or their own recombination of the world. Because what is engineering, anyway? It is putting together elements to make a construction that works.
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How rich a field is science for novelists?
A lot of writers don鈥檛 know anything about science and they don鈥檛 really care about it. It is more common to find biologists who are literate than it is to find literary people who are biologically inclined. It鈥檚 not that scientists don鈥檛 read books, it is often that writers cannot speak or read the language of science at all.
People are a lot more aware of science than they once were. It used to be considered really weird, and all those mad scientist stories stem from that. And it鈥檚 partly the fear of the unknown. What drives our choices and our decisions is not cold, hard reason: it is the emotional predilections of the human being. We ought to pay attention to those because it is fear and desire that drive the world. Knowledge is just something that helps us do it.
What do you make of science fiction?
A lot of science fiction is fantasy. It鈥檚 people flying around on dragons, other worlds of strange life forms. Some of them are quite well thought through, they know what the strange creatures eat, they know that life could be sustainable. Others are just having fun.
Oryx and Crake is not science fiction. It is fact within fiction. Science fiction is when you have rockets and chemicals. Speculative fiction is when you have all the materials to actually do it. We鈥檝e taken a path that is already visible to us. In 1984 and Brave New World, you could see all the elements that were farther down that particular path. I don鈥檛 like science fiction except for the science fiction of the 1930s, the bug-eyed monster genre in full bloom.
It鈥檚 clear you keep a close eye on science. Where do you get your information from?
I鈥檝e accumulated it. I also have something called 鈥渢he brown box鈥�. Once I had started writing this book I clipped everything that took my fancy and put it in the brown box. But all you have to do is look at an atlas. The sea level, the melting glaciers, how far the sea will rise 鈥� that鈥檚 all over the place. None of this information is hidden in some vault somewhere. Also my brother is a biologist and his son is a physicist and the other son is a materials engineer specialising in crystal-modelling computers. My father was an entomologist. My sister-in-law also trained as a biologist but is currently a ceramicist. I have to keep up my end at the Christmas family dinner party 鈥� recently we鈥檝e been doing intestinal parasites, much to the distress of other members of our family.
Why did you write Oryx and Crake now?
I was sitting on the balcony of Cassowary House in a nature reserve in northern Queensland, Australia, watching the red-necked crake, a species which is not very numerous. Australia is a place of mini systems. If you destroy that little bit of habitat then the species dies. That鈥檚 when I started writing it but I had years of background information. Oryx and Crake, like The Handmaid鈥檚 Tale, is based on certain axioms. One axiom is that the glaciers are indeed melting, the North is indeed getting warmer. Nobody really knows what is going on up there, but I can tell you from first-hand observation that the glaciers are receding and that people are very worried because the polar bear is threatened. I postulate global warming. I postulate that unless North America does something about its environmental laws, the aquifers will be depleted, groundwater will seep in and they鈥檒l become contaminated. And if you over-irrigate, you salinate the land 鈥� that鈥檚 happening in California now. That鈥檚 why everybody in this book is eating soya. We don鈥檛 even know whether it鈥檚 real soya.
People may think that these developments are not going to affect them but we saw the collapse of the cod fishery within the past 20 years. Bang. Gone. The model before that was the passenger pigeon. Everyone thought that they were so numerous, they would never run out. You can鈥檛 think that about anything anymore, except possibly viruses. Speaking of which, people have asked me if SARS is my fictional killer disease made real. I say no, this is not it.
How close is your speculative fiction to today鈥檚 science?
The goat spider is real, the multiple-organ pig is real. They haven鈥檛, as far as I know, yet implanted cortical tissue in a pig, as I have scientists do in the novel, but I am sure that will come. And the question is whether that is intrinsically bad. The answer is, of course not. I would say 80 per cent of inventions are beneficial. We鈥檙e going to have to depend on a lot of them before we can get out of this.
Privatisation and ownership are key issues in the book, too?
Yes. I also postulate what is already happening: public space has been more or less given up for lost. Security is now a matter of gated communities. Instead of having people living in one place and commuting, which has now become too unsafe, in the book they鈥檝e got the mall within the walls, like castles. Corporations want to prevent knowledge theft and raiding, because everything is now completely commercialised. That means the profit motive is the only motive. There is no more pure science, but if you鈥檝e looked at a university recently you know that the people who get the grants are the people that large corporations think might be doing something useful for them. What you have mostly is people thieving from graduate students, as it were. The students do the work, the guy puts his name on it and collects the rewards, but not in my book. Things are better in some respects: if the students invent something, they get to collect on it, which makes them very inventive.
Your engineered species, the Crakers, think in the short term, just like humans.
We鈥檙e hard-wired for short-termism, like any species, because if you don鈥檛 solve any short-term problem, you鈥檙e not going to be alive. Shall I cross the street? Maybe not, maybe I鈥檒l wait until I won鈥檛 get run over. That鈥檚 short-term thinking. It鈥檚 fast.
Are we humans capable of taking long-term decisions?
I think that we鈥檙e still quite capable of doing that. But where is the political will? Who鈥檚 going to run a campaign on it? Is it sexy enough? It will shortly become so, in my view. E. O. Wilson has been saying this. Between the times he started saying these things and campaigning, and now there has been a seismic shift. When he first started people were ignoring him or laughing at him. Now they鈥檙e saying, wait a minute, we鈥檝e got to do something. There was a huge palaver in Canada about whether global warming was true or not. Well, all the people who said it wasn鈥檛 have now been disproved. Nobody is now saying there isn鈥檛 any warming. They are saying they don鈥檛 know whether it鈥檚 due to people or not, maybe it鈥檚 just part of a natural cycle. In tens of thousands of years, if we keep going the way we鈥檙e going, we鈥檙e not going to be here, certainly not in the form we鈥檙e in now. Nature will be here. It鈥檚 just a question of whether we want people to be around to observe it, and whether we want nature to be all cockroaches, dandelions and rats, or maybe a bit more variety.
What can be done?
Major desalinators are needed now. Some cookie needs to invent that, do everybody a favour. Is it intrinsically wrong to want a new scheme? No, it has been part of humankind鈥檚 dream since the year dot to find out what we really want. You just go back and look at mythology because it鈥檚 all there: eternal youth, lots of money, beauty and power.
The Crakers barely seem to have a language. Is language important?
They don鈥檛 have a lot of language: there are things that they don鈥檛 need language for.
Are they poorer or richer for that?
We don鈥檛 know. We don鈥檛 know how they feel.
If some cultural traits were hard-wired, can you have things like free will?
The Crakers are starting to have free will by the end of the book. They are already doing art, which they aren鈥檛 supposed to have been able to do, and developing a religion. Not the type that the designer of this world, Crake, or his best friend, Jimmy, may have wished, but nonetheless a religion it is.
So no matter how intelligent the designer is, the design escapes the designer?
I think so. And there are some things Crake couldn鈥檛 design out. He couldn鈥檛 get rid of music and he couldn鈥檛 get rid of dreams. The Crakers are not idiots, by the way. I鈥檇 call them clever primates. But they鈥檙e more than that, they have no need for things that take up quite a bit of our time. When you remove those needs you also remove the cultural forms that supply those needs. For instance, they don鈥檛 need textiles so no big fields of cotton, no slaves. They don鈥檛 need to grow clothing and they don鈥檛 need to kill animals for skins. They鈥檙e vegetarian. They are more vegetarian than anybody because they eat leaves so they don鈥檛 have to have agriculture, which causes work, and that causes accumulation of goods and therefore social inequality because some people accumulate more than others and some people get to be bosses over others. My model is Jared Diamond鈥檚 Guns, Germs and Steel, brilliant book. Of course, you have to have a digestive system that could handle eating leaves, and I added a rabbit-like function 鈥� they can eat their own dung.
What about sex?
The Crakers are not monogamous and they鈥檙e not sexually active all the time. They come into season just like other primates. There was a very nice piece about the gelada monkeys of Ethiopia in National Geographic that I came upon after I鈥檇 finished Oryx and Crake. The males have a pink patch on their chest. When they acquire a harem of four females, who choose them, not the other way around, the pink patch becomes red. So a number of primates have these patches on them, these little bits that show you what is going on. I think that would be very useful.
What is the one thing that you鈥檇 like scientists to take with them from your book?
I鈥檓 not so worried about the scientists as everybody else. The scientists, if they鈥檙e life scientists, already know all of this. They may not know what to do because they may not have the money, but they certainly know the area. The physicists may not have focused on it or been very interested in it. But it would be the general voting public that I would be more concerned about, more particularly that they should start paying attention to preserving their biosphere. If I lived in Britain, I would be a big fan of the Hedgerow Society. If you want to plough right out to the edge, you shouldn鈥檛 do it. We鈥檝e just got a little field on an island in the middle of Lake Erie in Canada. We鈥檙e donating it to become an experimental organic farm. The big wave of the future is back to organics. It has to go that way. l