You probably know Margaret Atwood as, 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 patents? for remote robotic writing technology.
Or that she wrote a superhero comic book about
a mutant cat bird. 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 backwoods
of northern Quebec. And we aren't talking about,
like, acute 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. Twelve. 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 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 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, Dell 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.
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 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 non -fiction 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, 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, um...
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 Matt Adam trilogy. Oh, Oryx and Crake
and all that. Yeah. She has genetic modifications
running wild in those books. There are pig goons,
which are pigs bred with human brain tissue.
Terrifying. And ray -cunks, like a raccoon -skunk
hybrid. There are wool -vogs 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. Le Guin. Oh, wow, to be a fly
on the wall for that. Right. argued that Atwood
was absolutely writing science fiction. But Atwood
clarified that what Le Guin 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. OK, so it's 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. 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 escapist
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
precedents, 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?
Yeah. Atwood is doing the exact same thing with
societal norms. She takes a current political
policy or technological trend, bends it to its
absolute logical extreme using only real historical
precedents, 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.
Yeah. 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 Handmaid's Tale and its 2019
Booker Prize winning sequel, The Testaments,
saw 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 actions.
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. Following
the 2024 election, The Handmaid's Tale 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,
with institutions basically trying to suppress
or stress test. 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
Oryx and Crake. 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 to 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 head first into robotics
and cloud tech. It feels entirely contradictory.
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 Oryx and
Crake, 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 hand it off to some engineering
firm, did she? No, she founded the company. That's
amazing. Originally called Unnotch It 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 transition
from speculative fiction author to tech CEO is
just astonishing. And the technology didn't just
stay a novelty for book tours, right? No, it
evolved significantly. The company eventually
renamed itself Syngraphate Inc. 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 a hundred years
to print the anthologies. That's incredible.
And Atwood was selected as the very first contributor.
In 2015, she handed over a manuscript called
Scribbler 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 optimism. 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
which is widely taught and revered as a foundational
feminist text, she has frequently balked 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 MeToo 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. Her signature generated severe social
media backlash from some feminist critics who
felt she was betraying the MeToo 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 MeToo movement as a
symptom of a broken legal system, suggesting
that when institutions fail 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 toe any party line, regardless
of the social cost. Wait, this connects directly
back to her childhood in 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 structures. Oh, wow. Yes. To her... A society
abandoning due process in favor of public tribunals
looks exactly like the breakdown of rules that
precedes the dystopias 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.
Right. She has stated openly on social media
that she is a monarchist. Yep. And her dietary
restrictions are equally specific. She is a pescetarian
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 aligned with historical
red Toryism? invent robotic arms, and joke around
on daytime TV. It only seems contradictory if
you expect her to follow a prepackaged ideology.
Atwood's core defining characteristic is fiercely
independent thought. Right. 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 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
is fascinating. It is a piece of Atwood's family
history that we haven't touched on yet. And it
fundamentally recontextualizes 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 Puritan 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 Half -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 noose, 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 backwards 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.