![]() ![]() Animals are going extinct at a quick clip while strange, sick hybrids are being genetically engineered to amuse and feed humans military forces and the state have essentially become one. ![]() The rich are ensconced in walled enclaves of plenty while everyone else is left to “pleeblands,” degraded former cities and suburbs rampant with lawlessness. In Atwood’s near-ish future, global warming has reshaped the landscape - Harvard has drowned, New York City has relocated to New Jersey, and L.A.’s Venice canals have filled with a dirty sea. ![]() These biblical echoes are far from holy, however: a key locale is a high-end sex club calls “Scales and Tails,” where the acts incorporate snakes. Members of a fringe environmental group that survived address their senior men as Adam and women as Eve. Atwood’s flood is a plague created by a brilliant geneticist playing God, a man called Crake who tries to wipe out all the humans on Earth while creating a better species. ![]() The titles of the second and third books reference the origin and Noah stories found in the Bible. Her new novel, “MaddAddam,” concludes the trilogy begun in 2003 with “Oryx and Crake” and continued in “The Year of the Flood” (2009). Otherwise, the end of the world as we know it might be just too grim. I mean no disrespect to the author of “The Handmaid’s Tale” - in fact, it’s a good thing that she writes intelligent works of dystopian fiction with a sense of humor. Sometimes Margaret Atwood can get a little goofy. ![]()
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