Stranger Than Fiction, Margaret Atwood Edition
The Oryx and Crake author discusses why she writes about both the past and the future.
Listen to Stranger Than Fiction No. 3 with Tim Wu and Margaret Atwood by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:
Welcome to Stranger Than Fiction, a new six-episode podcast from Slate, the New America Foundation, and Arizona State University. Each week, Tim Wu—a Future Tense fellow at New America, the author of The Master Switch, and a professor at Columbia Law School—talks to a contemporary science fiction writer about whether we’re living in the future.
In the third episode, Wu talks to Margaret Atwood, author of science-flavored dystopian fiction like Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. In 2012, she published In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, in which she explored science fiction as an author and as a reader.
During their 20-minute conversation, Atwood and Tim discuss prisons, the downsides of relentless positivity, why she writes about the future, and more.
Check back every Monday for the next three weeks for a new Stranger Than Fiction episode, as Tim Wu speaks to Kim Stanley Robinson, Alastair Reynolds, and Robert Sawyer.
Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, the New America Foundation, and Arizona State University.