The Making of Margaret Atwood

https://thewalrus.ca/the-making-of-margaret-atwood/

by apollinaire • 7 years ago

44 72 7 years ago

I'm still flabbergasted that she and others seriously proclaimed Trump's election would bring about the scenario of the handmaids tale. I guess she should be excused for being ridiculous because of her old age, but I've lost all interest in her work.

(downvotes incoming in 3...2...1....)

pbourke• 7 years ago

To many of us, Trump's election felt like some kind of discontinuity in the timeline - sort of like the train had jumped tracks and now was on a different course.

I wonder if it always feels like that during stressful times, or whether it's a product of multiple worlds being a prominent sci-fi theme.

As for your original point, we've yet to see whether Roe v Wade is overturned, whether the rule of law will prevail, and whether the tide of isolationism, authoritarianism and nationalism will corrode the liberal internationalism that emerged after WW2.

dang5• 7 years ago

Please don't take HN further into off-topic generic (in this case political) tangents.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

dang5• 7 years ago

Please don't post political flamebait to Hacker News, and please don't downvote-bait. Both those things are in the site guidelines, and if you'd review and follow them, we'd be grateful.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

pksdjfikkkkdsff12• 7 years ago

Doesn't that apply to the submission about Atwood, though? It seems to me the "political flamebait" rule is applied rather selectively on HN.

astura2• 7 years ago

Where did she say that?

pksdjfikkkkdsff12• 7 years ago

I learned about it from her Twitter account, not sure if she talked about it elsewhere.

Edit: it is also right on top of the article - "her long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, was released, and she became something else entirely: a worldwide cultural phenomenon. The novel, set in a not-so-distant United States where fundamentalist fascists have gained power and stripped away women’s rights"

(Although I was referring to her comments before the release of the new book, but the new book confirms it).

mlang23• 7 years ago

"A worldwide cultural phenomenon"? I have never even heard her name, not a single time. Maybe your world is smaller then I thought.

dan-robertson• 7 years ago

What they mean is that her books were popular and read throughout the (developed I guess) world. And this is true. They were also made into tv series many people watched and radio plays. So obviously producers thought they would be popular. The books are also very critically acclaimed.

I think it would be hard to somewhat regularly buy books or go to a (typical English language) bookstore without seeing anything about Margaret Atwood.

But maybe there is a large world of English speaking people who don’t at all follow book releases or tv or even headlines in the mainstream news (where her winning of awards would be announced).

Freak_NL• 7 years ago

I think it would be hard to somewhat regularly buy books or go to a (typical English language) bookstore without seeing anything about Margaret Atwood.

The past month you cannot have entered any decently sized bookshop carrying new titles without encountering her name with The Testaments out. In my local bookshop I find the hardcover original English edition, its Dutch translation, The Handmaid's Tale in English and Dutch in editions ranging from paperback to luxury hardcover, and a bunch of her other works.

Before that, The Handmaid's Tale has been prominently displayed ever since the TV series came out.

big_chungus4• 7 years ago

I read a ton of books, and recall only briefly hearing of it maybe a year ago. Didn't read it; too culturally-political for my taste, and didn't hear of it again. I'll admit, however, I don't go to bookstores much anymore.

goto115• 7 years ago

I'm always amazed about why people brag about their ignorance. If you are curious you can google her name faster than you can write a comment complaining you haven't heard about her.

7777fps• 7 years ago

Ironically enough in firefox the google search is broken when searching for that term: https://www.google.com/search?q=the+handmaid%27s+tale

I see a large gray box and little else!

telesilla• 7 years ago

When I was a young woman in the 90s, you couldn't go to another friend's house without seeing her catalogue on the bookshelves, or at least the Handmaid's Tale.

gotorazor• 7 years ago

There are probably plenty of people on HN who don’t know who the Kardashians are. Heck, I bet plenty of people in the US who can’t name a Democratic presidential candidate.

But if you read English books in an English-speaking country and you semi-regularly visit a English language bookstore, she is a big deal.

If you look at the first picture of this article in the New Statesman:

https://www.newstatesman.com/%E2%80%8Beimear-mcbride-goldsmi...

She is the person right in the middle.

IAmEveryone2• 7 years ago

How many living female writers do you know? She'd probably be #2 on some "most influential" list, and definitely in the top 10.

cosmic_ape• 7 years ago

The context is that various authors comment on Atwood:

> The office of Jonathan Franzen: While he was pleased to receive your invitation, he must decline due to the fact that, although he is aware of Ms. Atwood’s love of birds, and he loves her for it, he’s never birded with her personally and can’t speak to any specifics regarding her conservation work.

klunger• 7 years ago

She looks down her nose at "science fiction" and claims that her work is "speculative fiction" instead. It is a pretentious, pedantic distinction and, as a lifelong scifi fan, it makes me deeply ambivalent to anything she produces. Even if it is good science fiction.

techer• 7 years ago

It’s a fair enough position but I think you’re also being pedantic here. I try to separate these matters from the creation and judge everything on its own merits.

swish_bob• 7 years ago

She writes well, but the snobbery towards "genre fiction" irks me enough that I generally refer to her as a science fiction writer who does other stuff.

I get the impression I'm not alone and a whole lot of people who enjoy good writing that may or may not be science fiction just wish she'd accept it and move on.

techstrategist2• 7 years ago

To be fair to Atwood, there was a lot of junk sci fi over the years that she would want to distance her work from.

psychometry• 7 years ago

Hell, even some of the most popular sci-fi today (cough—Three Body Problem—cough) would fit that bill. If I was an author in complete command of my craft like Atwood is, I wouldn't want to be explicitly associated with the genre, either.

mr_overalls• 7 years ago

Exactly - look at what kind of work dominated scifi in 1961, the year of her first published work.

The 1961 Hugo Award was given to Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys, a work about the discovery of an alien artifact on the moon. The only women in this book are vapid arm candy for the bold, intrepid male explorers.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_Moon

> Claire Pack, Barker's girlfriend, who flirts with both Hawks and Connington but knows she prefers the manliness of Barker. She has some sort of sado-masochistic bond with Barker; even when he hits her face in public, she says without irony, "Isn't he grand? Isn't he a man?"

This kind of treatment is pretty much par for the course in popular science fiction of the time. Bold, violent men riding around in spaceships and shooting rayguns at hostile aliens to save giggling, helpless women.

debt• 7 years ago

It’s also a marketing strategy. She’d serve a wider audience as speculative fiction than as science fiction.

bregma2• 7 years ago

She is beyond doubt pretentious and pedantic. She is also brilliant and can wield words in a way others wield deadly weapons in a theatre of war. You might have trouble listening to her say it, but it's almost always worth listening to what she says and how she says it.

Also, it's been a long time since I've seen science fiction and sci-fi jumbled together as a single genre.

slantyyz• 7 years ago

For context: When I was growing up and going to school (in Canada in the 80s), all of her work was generally classified as Canadian Literature, aka canlit. She was (and still is) considered one of our biggest home grown literary giants.

I don't think anyone here even thought of her work as science fiction back then.

patja• 7 years ago

I think this is a Canadian thing. Friends who emigrated to Nelson BC comment on how in the library, every book by a Canadian author has a maple leaf on the spine. Canada seems to have a bit of an underdog complex about maintaining its cultural identity in the shadow of its neighbor. The museum in Nanaimo has a whole shrine dedicated to famous Canadian entertainers...such as Loverboy and Bryan Adams. They also have a very comprehensive and delightful display covering the gem of Canadian desserts, the Nanaimo Bar.

aidenn0• 7 years ago

Kind of like Slaughterhouse Five in the US. It clearly fits the mold of science fiction except for being "serious".

geebee• 7 years ago

I can't get behind "looking down" at scifi, but the distinction between scifi and speculative fiction isn't necessarily pedantic. Speculative fiction creates a world sufficiently different from our own that we need to situate to it, which makes it similar to science fiction. But in terms of technology, everything matches what we have right now.

As long as you don't disparage a particular genre, it's an entertaining and thought provoking distinction, especially when you get right out on the line. For instance, the episode of Black Mirror "Nosedive" gets right out on that line. There isn't much technology that doesn't already exist, they've just gone a little farther with it in terms of electric cars. Then you could go in the other direction - all fiction is speculative to some extent, so when does it cross the line? I'd say it happens when you need to situate yourself to the rules of a very different world, in a broad sense, but very hard to say...

The Handmaid's Tale feels like science fiction to me, probably because it's in a vague future date. But I'm having trouble thinking of anything technology oriented that would have to exist and doesn't already.

billfruit• 7 years ago

She do get a lot of press, may be perhaps that is so because she is tune with the political fads of the time, rather than anything else. But shorn of their topicality, does her work has lasting value?

Even considering women writers writing in English only, she'd be considerably behind writers like Marilynne Robinson, Donna Tart, A.S Byatt or Arundhati Roy in the accomplishment of her work.

journalctl• 7 years ago

Considering that The Handmaid’s Tale was published in 1985, I’d say her work has lasting value.

skuthus• 7 years ago

does her work [have] any lasting value?

'Oryx and Crake' and 'Handmaids Tale' are some of the most vivid and impactful speculative fiction that I have ever read. Margaret Atwood will forever go down in history for both the prose and scope of her literature.

jfengel2• 7 years ago

I gave a book of her poetry (Penelopiad) to a friend of mine, a talented poet herself. She said it made her angry: this was what she'd been aiming for her whole life, and Atwood made it look easy.

I'm glad that Handmaid's Tale has brought her to a wider audience. It would be easy for her to be shunted into "genre fiction" for that book, or into "chick lit" for most of her other novels. But she's one of the most gifted prose stylists I've ever read. Her nonfiction book Payback, about debt, is actually quite insightful as well -- it came out at the heart of the financial crisis, but was developed before it began and is a very astute criticism of the entire financial system.

magneticnorth• 7 years ago

I'll have to read payback, I was unfamiliar with it, thanks for bringing it to my attention.

I have to say, though, this comment seems an odd mix of praising Atwood and seriously underestimating the scale and longevity of her fame and international regard. Like yes, her standard fiction novels are written by a woman and have female main characters, but nearly all of them were nominated for major international literary awards and many of them won - I don’t think any would qualify as “chick lit”, unless you’re taking the extremely broad stance of putting any novel written from a female perspective under that umbrella.

And assuming that your poet friend was unfamiliar with Atwood seems bizarre to me - I’m not a poet or in a literary field at all, but I was under the impression that she is one of the most well-known living poets (as a poet, not only a novelist), it’s just that poets/poetry don’t tend to be that well known in general.

jfengel2• 7 years ago

She is well known in literary circles, but I didn't think of her as a household name. My friend the poet knew her from Handmaid's Tale, but her poetry was less well known. (There are so many poets that even people who read a lot of poetry can easily miss a great one.)

The Making of Margaret Atwood

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