Grave new world Margaret Atwood talks Oryx and Crake BY CAROLYN CLAY

Margaret Atwood is fond of a Mayan creation myth "in which the world was created by gods, but before creating it, they worried." The eminent Canadian author, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize for The Blind Assassin, is herself not a little worried about the world, as is mightily evinced by her 2003 novel Oryx and Crake (Doubleday/Anchor). Atwood will be at MIT on April 4 to read from the book, a barely futuristic fantasy in which a loose wheel in an elitist scientific oligarchy has led to the devastation of the planet through a combination of genetic engineering and biological warfare. As the book opens on a jungle dystopia scorched by global warming, all that’s left are an Eden-esque cadre of invented people called Crakers (after their maker, the eponymous Crake) and Crake’s one-time best friend Jimmy, renamed Snowman (as in Abominable) and looking after the Crakers as best he can clothed in nothing but a filthy bedsheet.

Reached by phone at the Toronto offices of her anagrammatic authorial entity O.W. Toad Ltd., Atwood explains the difference between science fiction and speculative fiction, into which latter category Oryx and Crake and her best-known novel, the 1983 The Handmaid’s Tale, both fall. "This is an argument of terminology that goes back and forth in many ways. Some people use ‘speculative fiction’ as an umbrella term to define anything that isn’t realistic fiction. So under that umbrella could come science-fiction fantasy, science fiction proper, Weird Tales of the 1930s, ghost stories. You could have all kinds of stuff. That isn’t how I use it. I distinguish between speculative fiction, which deals with stuff we can already do or are on the verge of doing, and science fiction, which deals with things we can’t do and most likely never will be able to do and things that are unlikely to happen really, such as canisters being shot from Mars and creatures like giant squids." Since Oryx and Crake is a lot more near-fetched than that, Atwood classifies it as speculative fiction. "If we were dividing things up under headings, I would put it under the same heading as 1984 and Brave New World and under a different heading from The War of the Worlds and The Island of Dr. Moreau."

After the phone-book-size The Blind Assassin (2000), Atwood, as you might imagine, was not looking to plunge right back into a new novel. (She had in fact followed that effort with a series of lectures given at the University of Cambridge that became 2002’s Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing.) An avid nature watcher, she was birding in Queensland, Australia, when a rare sighting of the near-extinct red-necked crake set in motion her tale of a rigidly controlled world in which the scientifically adroit live in sanitized compounds messing with Mother Nature while ordinary folks wander the tacky and dangerous "pleeblands," teens’ brains are numbed by Internet porn and video games like "Extinctathon," and the brilliant Crake eventually unleashes a violent virus (encased in a pill called BlyssPluss) that covers the Earth like kudzu while his naked, green-eyed, peaceful, perfect Crakers remain immune.

The book, Atwood has said, came to her in an instant. "All at once, at a distance. By which I mean, you see a village in Italy from a distance. It has a shape. But when you get up close to it and go into it, of course, the shape changes and it’s a lot more winding and labyrinthine." She began writing in the spring of 2001, but the novel was almost derailed by September 11. "I was almost derailed. I was in the Toronto airport on my way to New York. So all that came to a halt, and like everyone else, I went home and stuck myself all over the TV screen. And it wasn’t the plot of the book, but the anthrax caper, which looked more and more like an inside job, certainly gave one pause. However, I was about halfway through the book" — which now has its own Web site, oryxandcrake.com.

Neither had the voraciously well-read author — who would as soon chat you up about the Asian termites that are eating New Orleans or the Australian possums that were smuggled into New Zealand and are hogging the flowers that are the favorite food of native birds as talk literature — had to do prodigious research to ground her fantasy. "I had a lot of it already in my head. Over the years, my reading of choice in an airport is likely to be Scientific American or some other profusely illustrated, clearly explained piece of pop science. I like the part where they tell you what they’ve found out but you don’t have to do the math. I’m quite happy to look at the results. I’m even happy to read about the methodology, how they did the experiments, because, remember, I grew up among scientists."

Like The Handmaid’s Tale, where reproduction has been taken over by a fundamentalist regime in a world that seems fast-forwarded from the Land of the Free, Oryx and Crake can be read as a cautionary tale. But Atwood argues that she’s not anti-science. "Science is a tool, and as a tool, it’s value-neutral. For instance, a hammer, as a tool, is value-neutral. The value comes from what you use it for. The value is put there by human beings, put there by the desires and fears of human beings, which is what drives everything. You may not have noticed, but we are not completely rational beings."

Neither would it be right to call Atwood a flat-out opponent of genetic engineering. "That wouldn’t be fair to say at all, because I think you could make things that would be quite beneficial. For instance, the kanga-lamb, which they’re already working on" — kanga-lamb is one of numerous improved or simulated food products alluded to in Oryx and Crake; this one just happens not to have been made up by Margaret Atwood. "They’re working on it. It would produce a sheep that produces less methane, which would be good. They do have a product sort of like Beano that they can give to cows to make them produce less methane, because the earth really is in danger from these intestinal gasses." She laughs, adding, "To say nothing of our own."

But she’s not amused by the proximity to reality of the totalitarian world of scientific engineering she envisions in Oryx and Crake. "Read Bill McKibben’s book called Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, which by some cosmic coincidence came out at the same time as Oryx and Crake and was reviewed by me in the New York Review of Books. He talks about the day-to-day of the more cutting-edge, shall we say, genetic-engineering people, who would like to make an immortal human being. In other words, it’s very hard to write total fiction. If you can think it up, someone else has thought it up and somebody might be working on it. That is not to say that you couldn’t make some quite good things. But if the process is driven entirely by greed, those things are unlikely to be very good for people in the long run, because they will just be another vehicle for turning the money in your bank account into the money in somebody else’s bank account."

One of the ways in which Atwood conjures the falling away of culture in Oryx and Crake is in the protagonist’s fragmented recollection of words and works that were once mother’s milk to him. " ‘Homer,’ says Snowman, making his way through the dripping-wet vegetation. ‘The Divine Comedy. Greek statuary. Aqueducts. Paradise Lost. Mozart’s music. Shakespeare, complete works. The Brontës. Tolstoy. The Pearl Mosque. Chartres Cathedral. Bach. Rembrandt. Verdi. Joyce. Penicillin. Keats. Turner. Heart transplants. Polio vaccine. Berlioz. Baudelaire. Bartok. Yeats. Woolf.’ There must have been more. There were more." Says Atwood, "Any piece of speculative fiction that we know anything about always has that component: how language changes, to exclude certain things. Look at Brave New World; there’s no more Shakespeare. Look at 1984; we all have to speak Newspeak. Remember Planet of the Apes? People can’t talk. They’ve lost language."

Does the author believe, then, that science has pushed art out of the nest of modern culture? "Had a look around lately? Watch where the money goes. Large corporations are investing in science, which they hope will make them more money. That is the mandate of a corporation. First of all, they’re supposed not to break the law, ha-ha-ha. Second, they’re supposed to make money for their shareholders. A lot of people are funny: they think there’s more money in science than in art, and they are right. It’s absolutely true. The catch is that what drives us is not our rational brain but our whole human arsenal of emotions and thought. And our only way of understanding that is through the arts."

Don’t tell that to the techie brainiacs at MIT, where Atwood will read from her clever, disturbing novel in which love and complex language have been left behind but sex and religious curiosity persist. She plans to read from the sections of the book set at the posh, prestigious Watson-Crick Institute, where the high-scoring Crake goes to college while Jimmy is relegated to the Martha Graham Academy, which is "named after some gory old dance goddess of the 20th century who’d apparently mowed quite a swath in her day." One hopes no one at MIT is breeding ferocious wolvogs or growing pulsating chicken parts for an endless supply of McNuggets, as they are at Watson-Crick. But, says Atwood, "Those MIT people, you know, you can’t get much past them."

Margaret Atwood reads from Oryx and Crake and signs copies of her book at 4 p.m. next Sunday, April 4, in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Room 10-250, 77 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge. The reading is free and open to the public.