So, last night Naomi and I went to Oxford to see Margaret Atwood being interviewed by Peter Kemp (fiction editor for The Sunday Times). All in all, I was pleasantly surprised. She was an entertaining interviewee, much given to wit and digression (one of the questions later, from someone clearly looking for the answer for his A-level coursework, was ( Read more... )

( A discussion )

More from Margaret Atwood, this time in New Scientist:
What do you make of science fiction?A lot of science fiction is fantasy. It's people flying around on dragons, other worlds of strange life forms. Some of them are quite well thought through, they know what the strange creatures eat, they know that life could be sustainable. Others are just ( Read more... )

In the Guardian:

Margaret Atwood's latest novel, Oryx and Crake , is not, she insists, "science fiction" but "speculative fiction". It is a distinction she has also made about her earlier dystopian book, The Handmaid's Tale (1985), currently being staged as an opera in London ( Read more... )