Friday, July 5, 2013
Maddaddam
One day soon, the Nobel Prize in Literature will likely be awarded to Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. She richly deserves it, having consistently written masterpieces over the past decades. She achieved a high point of her creativity with Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, which describe a dystopian near-future in which human civilization has collapsed in the face of massive climate change and a deliberate biotechnological apocalypse. These novels transcend science fiction, or any other genre. They are brilliant, eloquent, and deeply disturbing in how realistic a vision of societal and ecological collapse they evoke. What Jared Diamond did for the concept of collapse in nonfiction, with his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Atwood has equaled with fiction. Atwood has now announced that the final book in her trilogy, entitled Maddaddam, will be published on September 3, 2013. Everyone should read and ponder this trilogy. Perhaps Atwood should win Nobel Prizes in both Literature and Peace.