In Jimmy, Atwood has created a great character: a tragi-comic artist of the future, part buffoon, part Orpheus. And it is from Paradice that the apocalypse is launched. He calls Jimmy, now a not very successful copywriter, to his side to help do his PR. It is Crake who heads the ultimate Paradice project.
Atwood underlines the fatal progress between games and the "real" world. Crake is one such, and the codename Glenn takes as he moves to Grandmaster status. "Extinctathon" names the dead animals and charts the demise of species. "Blood and Roses" lines up atrocities and genocides against human achievements. It is while surfing porn sites that they come across the child who grows into Oryx. At school Jimmy, the misfit clown, meets his friend, Glenn, a super-intelligent nerd.
As if Asperger's were the name of the future game and reading emotions, like reading books, a trait which has been eroded in the survival of these particular fittest. In a post-nuclear world where conception is difficult and children scarce, the "haves" can bring in a caste of "have-not" handmaids to do the bearing for them, in the manner of barren Rachel and patriarch Jacob.Ītwood seems to be implying that, as the maths, computers and biotech grow ever more complex, spawn ever more dangerous by-products, human relations become brutalised, reduced, two-dimensional. Its disciplinary puritanism, its biblical literalness, its view of woman as a walking womb, are the cornerstones of Atwood's theocratic state of Gilead. The fundamentalist right was on the rise. The Handmaid's Tale inflected the basic totalitarian police state with current, feminist anxieties. Writing in 1984, Margaret Atwood gave Orwell's future an update. So the monsters haunting 1948 – both Nazi and Stalinist – were incarnated in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its ever-vigilant Big Brother, its thought police, its daily two minutes of hate and its newspeak, which enshrined "doublethink": War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. They prod our existing fears into the light and build a dystopic world on them. The best future fictions are deeply embedded in the present.
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