In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [39]
People have asked, many times, about the “inspiration” for these two books and their world. Of course there are proximate causes for all novels—a family story, a newspaper clipping, an event in one’s personal history—and for Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood there are such causes as well. Worries about the effects of climate change can be found as far back as 1972, when the Club of Rome accurately predicted what now appears to be happening, so those worries had long been with me, though they were not front-page stories in the spring of 2001 when I began Oryx and Crake. As with The Handmaid’s Tale, I accumulated many file folders of research; and although in both there are some of what Huckleberry Finn would call “stretchers,” there is nothing that’s entirely without foundation.
So I could point to this or that scientific paper, this or that newspaper or magazine story, this or that actual event, but those kinds of things are not really what drive the storytelling impulse. I’m more inclined to think that it’s unfinished business, of the kind represented by the questions people are increasingly asking themselves: How badly have we messed up the planet? Can we dig ourselves out? What would a species-wide self-rescue effort look like if played out in actuality? And also: Where has utopian thinking gone? Because it never totally disappears: we’re too hopeful a species for that. “Good,” for us, may always have a “Bad” twin, but its other twin is “Better.”
It’s interesting to me that I situated the utopia-facilitating element in Oryx and Crake not in a new kind of social organization or a mass brainwashing or soul-engineering program but inside the human body. The Crakers are well behaved from the inside out not because of their legal system or their government or some form of intimidation but because they have been designed to be so. They can’t choose otherwise. And this seems to be where ustopia is moving in real life as well: through genetic engineering, we will be able to rid ourselves of inherited diseases, and ugliness, and mental illness, and aging, and … who knows? The sky’s the limit. Or so we are being told. What is the little dystopia concealed within such utopian visions of the perfected human body—and mind? Time will tell.
Historically, ustopia has not been a happy story. High hopes have been dashed, time and time again. The best intentions have indeed led to many paved roads in Hell. Does that mean we should never try to rectify our mistakes, reverse our disaster-bent courses, clean up our cesspools, or ameliorate the many miseries of many lives? Surely not: if we don’t do maintenance work and minor improvements on whatever we actually have, things will go downhill very fast. So of course we should try to make things better, insofar as it lies within our power. But we should probably not try to make things perfect, especially not ourselves, for that path leads to mass graves.
We’re stuck with us, imperfect as we are; but we should make the most of us. Which is about as far as I myself am prepared to go, in real life, along the road to ustopia.
NOTES
1. John Gardner, Grendel, 1971.
2. The Tempest’s Golden Age is in Act II, Scene 1.
3. Underground fairylands and other worlds are numerous. I’ll mention only two: George MacDonald’s The Princess and Curdie (1883) and Aubrey Beardsley’s Under the Hill (1896).
4. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote an engaging preface to Treasure Island in which he describes this process.
5. Escape from caverns via animal tracking is a very old motif. See, for instance, One Thousand and One Nights.
6. “Copper cylinders”: See James de Mille, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, 1888.
7. “Hell hath no limits,” Doctor Faustus, Scene 5, pp. 120–135. “Paradise,” Paradise Lost, lines 585–7.
8. Honours English: a now-defunct course at