Atwood invents, signs, backs up with facts

As an experienced writer, Margaret Atwood has by now perfected the skills of book signing and… As an experienced writer, Margaret Atwood has by now perfected the skills of book signing and touring. But recently, she stepped beyond the confines of her title as a writer and into the realm of an inventor.

Coupled with the financial issues of touring, time simply did not allow Atwood to be everywhere in the world at once. As a result, she set up the company Unotchit, which makes long distance, computerized book-signing possible.

Atwood, known now for both her innovation and for her eerie fusion of modern science and the future in her writing, spoke at the Carnegie Music Hall Monday.

“Just think of it as a very long pen,” she said.

The system permits her to speak with readers across the world and virtually sign their books without being on the same continent.

“People thought it was weird that an author invented something. But why is that weird? That’s what we do all day: sit around and invent things,” she said.

Her most recent novel — and the one that will likely find the most use in her invention — is “Oryx and Crake.” Atwood is also widely recognized for her novel “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which has been converted to both a movie and an opera.

Atwood’s background heavily influenced her writing. Growing up in a house of biologists, as she described it, pushed her toward the science fiction that she is most known for. When she was a child, she and her brother created a science fiction comic book that starred the heroic efforts of carnivorous rabbits.

Though her plots have moved beyond those of her childhood, Atwood describes her works today as pushing the limits of the truth.

“My rule,” she said, “is to put nothing in [my writing] that could not be backed up by factoid.”

In a lecture she titled “Heaven and Hell and Planet X,” Atwood attempted her own explanation of the term “science fiction.”

With science implying knowledge and fiction suggesting feeling, they are two words that “you would think would be mutually exclusive,” she said.

Atwood rattled off a list of the things she said everyone desires, from the ability to fly to the desire to grant enemies the suffering they so deserve. These are the feelings and the wants that all humans experience, but that do not exist, she explained.

“Science fiction lends itself to those wants,” she said. This is where the connection between the two words lies.

Atwood discards the opinion that spy, adventure and science fiction novels, which are often placed together into the category of “unreal,” should be “sent to their room for the misdemeanor of being enjoyable.”

Science fiction novels “may be judged as a statement of verifiable truth,” she said, though not “slice-of-life, realistic novels.”

Through her own science fiction, Atwood attempts to push what people already know to the extreme. In her novel “Oryx and Crake,” she writes about the disaster that could come from genetic engineering.

She explained that many of her readers finished the story and wrote to her in frustration about the ending. She left the outcome up to the reader’s imagination, she said.

Atwood quoted William Blake: “The human imagination drives the world.” She explained that literature provides a means for the human imagination to speak by portraying human wants and the limits of those wants.

By using the science and information of today, Atwood uses her science fiction to create futures that experiment with the idea of human want. She illustrates the potential dangers of a future that fuses human want and human knowledge.

Through her writing, Atwood has created plausible and sometimes frightening futures.

“Nobody can predict the future, though. There are too many variables,” she said.