Loading...
About this Episode
How Margaret Atwood predicts our breaking point
Hosts & Guests
Transcript
You probably know Margaret Atwood is, well, the author of the Handmaid's Tale.
Right. I mean, that iconic red cloak and the white bonnet.
Exactly. They're practically burned into our collective cultural retinas at this point.
Oh, totally.
But did you know she also holds actual literal tech patterns for remote robotic writing technology?
Or that she wrote a superhero comic book about a mutant catbird.
Right. What about the fact that she penned a secret novel that no human being is allowed to read
until the year 2114?
Yeah, just sitting locked away in a vault in Norway right now.
Just slumbering. So you have this stack of seemingly random puzzle pieces, right?
A wilderness survivor, a robotics inventor, and accused witches descendant.
It's a lot to process.
It is. And today we are putting those pieces together.
We're taking our stack of sources on this Canadian literary giant and really diving into it.
Our mission for this deep dive is to figure out how Margaret Atwood
built a career out of perfectly predicting the terrifying futures we are
currently building for ourselves.
Yeah. And to get there, you really have to discard that stereotypical image
of the quiet novelist sitting in a dusty study somewhere.
Atwood operates almost entirely outside traditional categories.
She's this intellectual force who actively resists being boxed into
like any single genre or political camp or even timeline.
I want to start with the origin of that independence, actually.
Because to understand how she's so clearly
envisions the collapse of modern society,
you really have to look at how she grew up completely isolated from it.
Oh, yeah.
We're talking about a child that sounds like it belongs in a totally different century.
It really does.
And it's basically the blueprint for everything she eventually wrote.
So she was born in Ottawa in 1939, but her father was a forest entomologist.
Wait, so he studied bugs?
Exactly, bugs in the forest.
And because of his field research, she spent the majority of her early childhood
deep in the remote backwards of Northern Quebec.
And we aren't talking about like a cute cabin near a town.
We're talking about true isolation in the dense Canadian bush far,
far away from the comforts of any modern infrastructure.
Yeah, looking at the sources, she didn't even attend school full time
until she was 12 years old.
12.
I mean, I kept thinking about this while preparing for today.
It's almost like she was raised on a different planet.
Or like she's this alien anthropologist who just got dropped into modern society
right at the onset of puberty.
That's a great way to put it.
Because she wasn't socialized normally during those, you know, really formative years,
she looks at human societal rules, not as given truths,
but as bizarre, arbitrary and honestly incredibly fragile constructs.
That alien anthropologist perspective is just crucial here.
Instead of regular playground socialization, you know, playing tag or whatever,
she became this voracious reader of Grimm's fairy tales, comic books,
del pocketbook mysteries.
Just reading about murder in the woods.
Exactly.
She was reading these dark stories of survival and murder
while completely surrounded by the raw, untamed wilderness.
And that extreme immersion, it just stripped away any illusion of human safety.
Right.
It taught her from day one that the world is fundamentally a predator prey environment.
I mean, nature does not care about your societal rules.
No, it doesn't.
It doesn't care about your moral compass.
Nature is an active force that will absolutely consume you if you aren't paying attention,
which she actually formalized later in her career.
That background seems to be the entire basis for her landmark 1972 nonfiction book survival.
It is.
Yeah.
In survival, she put forward this highly influential thesis that Canadian literature
and really by extension, the Canadian identity itself,
is defined by this omnipresent symbol of survival.
Right. It's just making it through the winter.
Yeah.
She argued that there's a pervasive,
victor and victim relationship running through the culture
and it's driven largely by a deep-seated fear of nature,
which is so different from the American view.
Exactly.
Unlike some romanticized American literature where the frontier is,
you know, something to be conquered and tamed,
her view of the Canadian wilderness is that it's just something you simply try to survive
without it killing you.
So because she views the world
through that specific lens of actual physical survival against real threats,
she gets incredibly defensive about how her work is categorized.
Oh, fiercely defensive.
Like she violently rejects the label of science fiction
for her most famous dystopian books.
She is famously specific about this distinction.
For Atwood, science fiction is, in her own words,
talking squids in outer space,
which is such a funny phrase.
But I have to push back on this a little bit for you listening
because I read through these notes and thought,
come on, is she just engaging in literary snobbery here?
It sounds like it at first glance.
Right.
Like, why is she so resistant to the sci-fi label,
when she's clearly writing apocalyptic stories about the future?
I mean, look at her mad atom trilogy.
Orics and craic and all that.
Yeah.
She has genetic modifications running wild in those books.
There are pigoons, which are pigs bred with human brain tissue,
terrifying and raconcs like a raccoon's conch hybrid.
There are wool logs that look like cute dogs,
but will literally tear your throat out.
Yeah.
I mean, how is a human pig hybrid not science fiction?
Well, it definitely sounds like it,
and it's a debate she's had extensively.
The most notable one was a fascinating discussion back in 2011
with the legendary science fiction author Ursula K. Laguin.
Oh, wow, to be a fly on the wall for that.
Right.
And Laguin argued that Atwood was absolutely writing science fiction,
but Atwood clarified that what Laguin calls science fiction,
Atwood calls speculative fiction.
Speculative fiction.
Yeah.
For Atwood, speculative fiction means things that could really happen.
It employs means that are already at hand
and takes place entirely on planet earth.
So the distinction isn't about snobbery at all.
It's fundamentally about the source of the terror.
Okay, says about the mechanism of the fear,
not just the setting.
Precisely.
She operates on a strict golden rule.
She famously applied this to the writing of the handmaid's tale.
Right.
She says she never puts anything in her books
that somebody somewhere in human history hasn't already done
or that we don't already have the technological capacity
to do today.
That is chilling.
It really is.
If she uses talking squids in outer space,
you, the reader, can just brush the story off
as a scapest fantasy.
You can close the book, put it on your nightstand
and feel totally safe.
Because squids don't talk.
Right.
But if she uses real historical precedence,
if she demonstrates that humanity has already committed
these atrocities under different regimes,
you are forced to face the reality of what we're capable of.
It's almost like she is engaging in a literary form
of like stress testing.
Oh, I like that.
You know how engineers will take a piece of metal
and bend it until it snaps,
just to find its breaking point at wood
is doing the exact same thing with societal norms.
She takes a current political policy
or a technological trend,
bends it to its absolute logical extreme
using only real historical precedence,
and shows us exactly where our society will snap.
That is the perfect way to describe her process.
She isn't inventing horrors out of thin air.
She is just reorganizing them into our near future.
And because she strictly limits herself
to what humans are already capable of,
her fiction functions as a literal economic indicator.
Yes.
We can actually track public anxiety
by looking at the sales data of her books.
It's wild to look at the numbers.
It is.
When we look at the data, the handmade sale,
and it's 2019 Booker Prize winning sequel
of the testaments,
saw a massive rapid sales spikes
immediately following the shifts in power
during both the 2016 and the 2024 United States
presidential elections.
And I want to pause here really quickly
just to be absolutely clear to you listening,
we are not taking a political side
regarding these elections.
We're totally neutral on this.
Exactly.
We aren't endorsing any viewpoint here.
We're simply looking at the data
and observing how the public reacts
to societal anxiety by buying atwood's books.
It's purely a cultural and economic phenomenon.
And what's fascinating is how those book sales act
as a completely nonpartisan anxiety barometer.
Regardless of your political leaning,
the data just shows a massive cultural reflex.
Yeah.
Following the 2024 election,
the handmade sale shot up to third
on Amazon's bestseller list.
The public essentially uses her speculative fiction
to process their real world apprehension.
Atwood herself even responded
to that specific cultural moment in 2024
by posting on X, despair is not an option.
It helps no one.
Wow.
And we see that cultural reflex
going in the opposite direction too.
Yeah.
With institutions basically trying
to suppress her stress tests.
Oh, definitely.
Like in 2024, the Utah public school system
instituted a book ban under new state law.
And right there on their initial list
of objectionable books was atwood's orics and creak.
She manages to strike such a nerve
that her work is simultaneously pushed
to the top of bestseller logs
and pulled from library shelves in the exact same year.
It really just proves that her method
of relying on historical precedent
makes the work undeniably potent.
But, you know, she doesn't limit
her stress testing just a fiction.
Right.
She actively participates in building
the technological future she writes about.
Which brings us back to the patents
you mentioned at the start of our deep dive.
Yeah, I kept staring at this part of our sources.
Because we're talking about a woman
in her 60s at the time.
Famous for writing about how unchecked corporate technology
basically enslaves humanity.
Yeah.
Deciding to jump headfirst
into robotics and cloud tech.
It feels entirely contrary.
It totally seems that way
until you look at the actual logistical problem
she was trying to solve.
OK, what was it?
So in early 2004, she was on this grueling book tour
in Denver for orics and crakes.
And she realized the physical demands
of flying across the world just to sign pieces of paper
were completely unsustainable.
I mean, book tours are exhausting.
Right.
So she conceived the concept of a remote robotic writing
technology.
She wanted to be able to sit in her living room
in Toronto, sign a screen, and have a robotic arm
physically write that signature in real ink
on a book in Tokyo in real time.
But she didn't just have the idea and handed off
to some engineering firm, did she?
No, she founded the company.
That's amazing.
Originally called a notchit ink.
They produced a device known as the Long Pen.
And she had to actively participate in figuring out
how to translate the physical pressure
and the kinetic energy of a human hand across an ocean.
So the ink wouldn't blotch or skip on the page.
She applied the exact same rigorous mechanical logic
she uses to build dystopian worlds
to solving latency issues in robotic arms.
That's that transition from speculative fiction
author to tech CEOs, just astonishing.
And the technology didn't just
a novelty for book tours, right?
No, it evolved significantly.
The company eventually renamed itself
Singrafe ink.
And they shifted away from book tours
into high-level business and legal transactions,
offering secure, cloud-based, electronic signature technology.
Yeah.
As of our source data, Atwood remains a director
and continues to hold various patents related
to this technology.
She is navigating the bleeding edge of modern corporate tech
while simultaneously looking way, way down the timeline
of human civilization.
Exactly.
I mean, if the Long Pen is her dealing with the present,
the future library project is her communicating
with a world she will never even see.
The future library is arguably
one of the most profound poetic projects
she has ever participated in.
It's so cool.
It really is.
It's a public art project based in Norway,
where one writer a year contributes a manuscript
that will be held in trust completely unread for a century.
A hundred years.
Yeah.
The organizers even planted a specialized forest of trees
that will eventually be cut down in 100 years
to print the embolologies.
That's incredible.
And Atwood was selected as the very first contributor.
In 2015, she handed over a manuscript called Skribler Moon.
Meaning no one is allowed to read it, review it,
or publish it until the year 2114.
Exactly.
She likened the entire concept to a fairy tale,
telling a guardian that it is like sleeping beauty.
The texts are going to slumber for a hundred years,
and then they will wake up and come to life again.
Wow.
She even joked that readers in 2114
might need a paleoanthropologist to translate
some of the obsolete cultural references in her story.
That's so funny.
But when you look at her overarching career,
what does a project like that signify?
We have this globally recognized expert on dystopia,
someone who makes her living warning us
about our darkest impulses,
leaving a manuscript for a civilization a hundred years from now.
Well, it encapsulates a vital, often overlooked aspect
of her ethos, which is her fundamental optimist.
Optimism, really?
Yes.
Think about it.
She writes incredibly bleak cautionary tales
where society collapses.
But to write a book for the year 2114,
requires a baseline belief that humanity will actually
survive to see the year 2114.
Oh, that's a great point.
Despite the horrors she catalogs in her speculative fiction,
she believes there will be a future
and there will be people in it
who still have the capacity to care about stories.
She genuinely trusts in human endurance.
She refuses to be constrained by our current timeline,
just as she refuses to be boxed in
by the boundaries of literary genres.
Exactly.
And as we dig deeper into the sources,
you see that she staunchly refuses to be boxed in
by political or social labels either.
Even when her own readers desperately
try to make her a figurehead for their movements.
Oh, her relationship with ideological labels
is incredibly complex,
particularly when it comes to feminism.
Right.
Despite writing the Handmaid's Tale,
which is widely taught and revered
as a foundational feminist text,
she has frequently boxed at the label.
She often prefers the term social realism.
Which actually makes perfect sense
when you remember her golden rule.
Oh, so.
Well, if she is only writing down
what patriarchal societies have actually done
to women throughout history,
she doesn't view it as feminist theory.
She views it as historical reporting.
Ah, right.
But her resistance to adopting ideological labels
has gotten her into intense controversies
with her own fan base.
The 2018 Me Too controversy is a prime example of this.
And again, just to be clear,
we are neutrally reporting the events
from the sources here.
Yes, absolutely.
So in 2018, Atwood signed an open letter
calling for an independent investigation
into a university's handling of the firing of a professor
who had been accused of sexual harassment and assault.
Right.
Signature generated severe social media backlash
from some feminist critics
who felt she was betraying the Me Too movement
by seemingly defending an accused abuser.
And she didn't back down, did she?
No, in response, she wrote an op-ed for the Globe and Mail
titled, Am I a Bad Feminist?
In that op-ed, she defended her position by stating
she was strictly supporting due process in the legal system.
She argued that unquestioning condemnation
without a fair, transparent institutional process
is incredibly dangerous.
She even referred to the Me Too movement
as a symptom of a broken legal system,
suggesting that when institutions failed to provide justice,
people resort to internet tribunals,
which she views as a dangerous precedent.
And that position angered a lot of her longtime supporters,
who felt she was failing to understand
the power dynamics at play.
But her stance really highlights her absolute refusal
to tow any party line regardless of the social cost.
Wait, this connects directly back to her childhood
and the woods, doesn't it?
Oh, how so?
She views the Me Too movement not through a partisan lens,
but as the alien anthropologist
watching a society bypass its own established legal stress.
Well, wow, yes.
To her, a society abandoning due process
in favor of public tribunals looks exactly
like the breakdown of rules that precedes
the dystopia she writes about.
That is a profound connection.
She's applying the exact same critical stress-testing lens
to her allies that she applies to her adversaries.
She demands rigorous critical thinking over mob consensus,
even when the mob thinks they're doing the right thing.
Exactly.
And it's why she possesses a host of seemingly contradictory labels
that just confuse people who try to categorize her.
The list of her self-professed labels is wild.
It really is.
She has called herself a red Tory,
which she defines in the historical Canadian sense
as someone who believes that society should be structured
with order, but that those in power
have an absolute paternalistic responsibility
to care for the community and the disadvantaged.
She has stated openly on social media
that she is a monarchist, and her dietary restrictions
are equally specific.
She is a peasantarian who absolutely refuses
to eat anything with fur or feathers,
but she will gladly eat gastropods, like snails are fine.
Yeah, she draws a very weird firm ethical line
at eating snails.
It's so specific.
And on top of all this heavy intellectual philosophy,
she has this incredible dry sense of humor.
Oh, her humor's fantastic.
In 2024, she just randomly popped up in a cameo
on the Canadian procedural television show Murdoch Mysteries.
She played an amateur ornithologist looking at birds.
Naturally.
So as a reader, how do you reconcile this?
How does the woman who wrote the ultimate feminist dystopian
text also anger modern feminist critics
align with historical red Toryism,
invent robotic arms, and joke around on daytime TV?
It only seems contradictory if you
expect her to follow a pre-packaged ideology.
Atwood's core, defining characteristic
is fiercely independent thought.
She views unquestioning adherence to any group
or the blind acceptance of any dogma
as the exact mechanism that creates totalitarianism.
To Atwood, the moment you stop questioning
your own side's method is the exact moment
you start laying the bricks for Gilead.
So to prevent the dystopia, you have
to be willing to anger your own allies.
Yes.
You have to maintain that wilderness survival instinct,
and you have to be willing to look at the wolves,
even when they're wearing the sheep's clothing
of your own political party.
You have to remain the alien anthropologist at all times.
You can never get too comfortable
with the societal rules of the present,
because they can be rewritten overnight.
Margaret Atwood is an untamable intellectual force.
She is a wilderness survivor who views civilization
as a thin veneer.
She is an inventor solving the mechanical problems
of the future and a writer who uses the darkest parts
of human history to build a stress test for our present.
She forces us to look squarely at what we are capable of,
denying us the comfort of talking
squids in outer space to distract us
from our own reflections.
But before we wrap up this deep dive into the source material,
I want to leave you the listener with one final provocative
thought to mull over on your own.
Oh, this part's fascinating.
It is a piece of Atwood's family history
that we haven't touched on yet.
And it fundamentally re-contextualizes everything
we've just discussed about her life and her work.
It's one of those historical details
that sounds like it must be fiction,
but it is entirely real.
According to Atwood's grandmother,
their family is directly descended
from a woman named Mary Webster.
Mary Webster.
Right, Mary Webster was a 17th century
period of woman living in Massachusetts
who was accused of witchcraft.
She was subjected to a trial, convicted,
and she was actually hanged from a tree and left for dead.
But she didn't die.
Unbelievable.
When they came to cut her down the next morning,
she was still alive.
She survived the hanging, and she
lived for another 14 years.
Atwood even wrote a poem about her
called Have Hanged Mary.
And this is the kicker.
She dedicated the handmaid's tale to her.
A woman who literally survived the ultimate
oppressive dogmatic system of her time.
Exactly.
So I want you to ponder this.
How much of Margaret Atwood's lifelong obsession
with surviving oppressive systems
is just creative brilliance.
And how much of it is literally in her blood.
Wow.
An ancestral memory passed down from a woman
who simply refused to die at the hands
of a fanatic society.
When you're the descendant of a woman
who beat the hangman's news,
maybe you don't need talking squids to understand terror.
You really don't.
Maybe you just need to look at the world around you,
bend it to its breaking point,
and write down exactly what happens next.
From the back was of Quebec to the sealed vaults
of the year 2114.
The alien anthropologist is always taking notes.
Keep that in mind.
The next time you see a red cloak.
