MANY years ago I thought that Margaret Atwood’s was a 1980s feminist dystopia, scarcely connected to any real world. Now, factor in the repro-tech revolution, authoritarian governments, fundamentalist Christians, pragmatic Taliban, a persistent war of the sexes, and I fear as I fear any true seer.
Wherever you file The Year of the Flood – science fiction, satire, speculative fiction, dystopia, allegory (frankly it scarcely matters) – careful reading leaves you feeling you could easily wake up in this world, a revisiting of her earlier Oryx and Crake from a bottom-up, female viewpoint.
Despite the mix of genres,…
