“You up for this?,” asked author Margaret Atwood mischievously on Thursday’s Late Night With Seth Meyers when the host asked her to read his palm. Meyers was game, even though asking The author of The Handmaid’s Tale to predict the future seems like a recipe for unsettlingly prescient bad news. There to promote The Testaments, the new, long-awaited sequel to her legendary 1985 dystopian novel of right-wing misogynist oppression, the twinkly 79-year-old author indulged Meyers with what she termed “straight Renaissance palmistry”—and mostly good news. (Long life, not going to be president, “less stubborn” and “more stable” than people think—definitely could have been worse.)
Still, as Atwood told Meyers, the worst future one can possible imagine has a way of coming true. The author spoke about the enduring “second life” of The Handmaid’s Tale, which has been a movie, opera, graphic novel, ballet, global (if sometimes sputtering) TV phenomenon, and, as Atwood noted with some appreciation, a protest meme and costume for women’s rights all over the world. (She’s not so sure about the “sexy Handmaid” Halloween getup someone who missed the point has brought to market.) Claiming that she’d started writing The Testaments (about two young women and the terrifying Aunt Lydia giving their very different accounts of life in- and outside human rights graveyard Gilead) before the election of 2016 seemed to be setting America up as a Handmaid’s Tale prequel, Atwood did say that the rise of widely alleged sexual predator Donald Trump and a Vice President who won’t allow a woman to speak to him in private “put wind in [her] sails” as far as reentering the world of her most famous work.
“It encouraged me,” said the Canadian Atwood of the rise of evangelical assholery currently holding sway in America, and noting that, as (yet) farfetched as her post-sanity United States may seem, her rule in writing The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments was to never make up any form of subjugation, oppression, or evil that hasn’t actually occurred somewhere in the history of humans being really, really terrible to women. So that’s sobering. (She also noted impishly that, like one of the characters in The Testaments has done, Americans historically have fled to her native Toronto when things “go pear-shaped” down here.)
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I know it is because of the award winning TV show, but when was the last time an SF author had a nationally televised book tour? Did GRRM get one during Game of Thrones’ run? You don’t see a whole lot of fiction authors on late night TV and even fewer genre authors.
I’d hardly call Margret Atwood a genre author, although she’s written books that are generally recognized as science fiction. She’s won the Booker, the Giller, the Governor General’s (twice) .. she’s also published poetry, experimental essays. She’s a Serious Author first and foremost.
I don’t think there is any need to have the “SF can’t be Serious Literature (TM)“ discussion again. She is clearly promoting a work of science fiction (yeah, yeah…it’s nonfiction…we live in Gilead…you’re all so funny…moving on) and getting on late night TV for it and that doesn’t happen very often at all. As I pointed out, even “Serious Authors” don’t get on TV often for fiction.
But I love that discussion! Actually, the discussion we want to have is is Haidmaid’s Tail science fiction? According to Atwood it isn’t, and I think many agree that it lacks the ‘sci/tech’ trappings of genre scifi. But you’re still right, not a lot of authors get on TV, but some do and given the social commentary/satire nature of her work, it’s not surprising that she makes a decent guest/interview subject.
Only slightly worse than “it can’t be SF because it is good” is the discussion about what is and is not SF. Some authors even campaign against having their work called SF because they are afraid it ghettoizes it although I don’t think Atwood cares about that. I tend to be an inclusionist and allow a lot of sub-genres to be included that other people exclude – like alt-history. It isn’t historical fiction, high fantasy, horror, a mystery, a hard boiled detective story, noir, romance, YA, or anything else. It can be SF and literature at the same time. I would say it is SF but I have disagreed with Atwood before about her own work. I think it is kind of a useless discussion to have because so many things combine or cross genres these days.It is fun to watch her interviewed, I agree.
Diana Gabeldon has done several for her “Outlander” series, after the TV Show took off. She has a new book coming out sometime in 2020, and I am pretty sure that she’ll do another one then.
Margaret Atwood is a treasure. I saw her speak once, on the book tour for one of the Madd Adam trilogy books, and she was brilliant. (I even got her autograph, and had her sign my limited edition copy of The Journals of Susannah Moodie). I’m so glad she’s getting more of the recognition she so richly deserves.
“Twinkly” and “impish”? She deserves better than that.
“None of that woo-woo stuff, it’s based on astrology!”