Burning Questions

Chapter 1

Scientific Romancing

(2004)

I m very honoured to have been asked to give the Kesterton Lecture here at Carleton s School of Journalism and Communication.

I note that I m the fourth in this series, and that I ve been preceded by three very eminent men. I have always distrusted the number 4, whereas I do have a preference for the number 3. So I ve broken the dubious 4 down into two sets: one of three, a lucky moonstruck set, which includes persons of the male persuasion but excludes me; and a second set of one, which includes persons of the female sort and also, incidentally, me. I am therefore the first in a set that I trust will number many more individuals before long.

That s the feminism for this evening, which, as you can see, I have cunningly combined with the initial fooling around so you won t feel too threatened by it. I ve never known why people have sometimes felt threatened by me. After all, I m quite short, and apart from Napoleon, what short person has ever been threatening? Second, I m an icon, as you ve doubtless been told, and once you re an icon you re practically dead, and all you have to do is stand very still in parks, turning to bronze while pigeons and others perch on your shoulders and defecate on your head. Third, I am astrologically speaking a Scorpio, one of the kindest and gentlest of astrological signs. We like to lead quiet lives in the dark and peaceful toes of shoes, where we never give any trouble unless someone attempts to cram an aggressively large yellow-toenailed foot in on top of us. And so it is with me: no bother at all unless stepped on, in which case I can t answer for the consequences.

The title of my small talk tonight is Scientific Romancing. Its cover story is that it s about science fiction. Its subtext is probably What is fiction for? or something like that. The subtext under that will be a few paragraphs on the two scientific romances I myself have written. And the sub-sub-subtext might turn

Introduction
 
Part I: 2004 to 2009 | What Will Happen Next?
Scientific Romancing
Frozen in Time
From Eve to Dawn
Polonia
Somebody’s Daughter
Five Visits to the Word-Hoard
The Echo Maker
Wetlands
Trees of Life, Trees of Death
Ryszard Kapuściński
Anne of Green Gables
Alice Munro: An Appreciation
Ancient Balances
Scrooge
A Writing Life
 
Part II: 2010 to 2013 | Art Is Our Nature
The Writer as Political Agent? Really?
Literature and the Environment
Alice Munro
The Gift
Bring Up the Bodies
Rachel Carson Anniversary
The Futures Market
Why I Wrote Maddaddam
Seven Gothic Tales
Doctor Sleep
Doris Lessing
How to Change the World?
 
Part III: 2014 to 2016 | Which Is to Be Master
In Translationland
On Beauty
The Summer of the Stromatolites
Kafka
Future Library
Reflections on The Handmaid’s Tale
We Are Double-Plus Unfree
Buttons or Bows?
Gabrielle Roy
Shakespeare and Me
Marie-Claire Blais
Kiss of the Fur Queen
We Hang by a Thread
 
Part IV: 2017 To 2019 | How Slippery Is the Slope?
What Art Under Trump?
The Illustrated Man
Am I A Bad Feminist?
We Lost Ursula Le Guin When We Needed Her Most
Three Tarot Cards
A Slave State?
Oryx and Crake
Greetings, Earthlings! What Are These Human Rights of Which You Speak?
Payback
Memory of Fire
Tell. The. Truth.
 
Part V: 2020 to 2021 | Thought and Memory
Growing Up in Quarantineland
The Equivalents
Inseparable
We
The Writing of The Testaments
The Bedside Book of Birds
Perpetual Motion and Gentleman Death
Caught in Time’s Current
Big Science
Barry Lopez
The Sea Trilogy
 
 
Acknowledgements
Credits
Index

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her novels include Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and the MaddAddam trilogy. Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid’s Tale, was followed in 2019 by a sequel, The Testaments, which was a global number one bestseller and won the Booker Prize. In 2020 she published Dearly, her first collection of poetry for a decade.
 
Atwood has won numerous awards including the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. She has also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright and puppeteer. She lives in Toronto, Canada.

"[Burning Questions] reflects both the urgency of the issues dear to her literature, feminism, the environment, human rights and their combustibility...The book s scope and the perspicacity of her writing evince the reading and thinking of a long life well lived."
Washington Post

"Inspiring...Always in demand for her keen perception and bewitching storytelling, Atwood presents witty, parrying, and complexly illuminating tales about her long, ever-vital writing life."
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"This collection is marked both by her ongoing concern with the ethical and moral issues her fiction raises and an appealing flexibility in terms of subject matter...Smart and concerned essays and arguments from an author whose global concerns haven t flagged."
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Canadian poet, novelist and literary critic Margaret Atwood s diverse and intense interests in subjects from feminism to climate change are on full display in her latest book."
Associated Press

"Atwood s writing voice is both accessible and compelling: she invites you in, and you want to keep reading...Despite the difficult truths told across these many pages, there is humor here and there is hope...This collection clearly shows what many of us already know, Atwood is one of our greatest writers, and although she claims to not be prophetic (ha!), we should all pay attention to what she s saying."
The Brooklyn Rail

Praise for Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood [is] a living legend.
The New York Times Book Review
 
One of the most admired practitioners of the novel in North America.
Alan Cheuse, Chicago Tribune

"Brilliant...Atwood is a poet....as well as a contriver of fiction, and scarcely a sentence of her quick, dry yet avid prose fails to do useful work, adding to a picture that becomes enormous."
The New Yorker
 
There may be no novelist better suited to tapping the current era s anxieties than Margaret Atwood.
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