![]() ![]() Everyone, except, of course, The Gardeners. The Gardeners grow food in rooftop gardens, wear homemade clothes, preserve the genomes of extinct animals, and brush their teeth with “frayed twigs.” Their fundamental message is that disaster cometh. Central to the book is a particularly earthy one called “The Gardeners,” a lifestyle religion that fuses evolutionary theory with Hebrew traditions and hippie mishmash. An all-seeing security army executes illegal immigrants and uses cyborg honeybees to spy on enemies. As in her 2003 novel, Oryx and Crake, Atwood presents a vision of a miserably hot, totalitarian future in which people live either in gated corporate compounds or in seething “pleebs.” Corporations kill off employees, smuggle viruses into pills, and grow human replacement organs inside pigs. ![]() Margaret Atwood’s latest book, The Year of the Flood, is about as dystopian as novels get. Who wants to read a novel in which everyone is flawlessly educated, respects wildlife, and recycles their aluminum? Give me dystopia every time: gunned-down dissidents and simmering metropolises and haywire genetic experiments. ![]()
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