A Dystopia Sketched in Crayon

Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood is a sequel and a companion piece to her earlier novel Oryx and Crake. Like that book, The Year of the Flood is arguably a work of science fiction, and, like that book, it raises interesting questions about literature and genre.

The Year of the Flood takes place in a near-future dystopia that is collapsing under its own weight. In this world, corporate capitalism governs and regulates every human transaction. The commons has been replaced by the mall, the police by a ubiquitous private security force. Everything from love to art has become a commodity, its value determined solely by the price it commands in the marketplace. The resultant toll on the natural world is enormous but largely ignored, except by a cadre of religious environmentalists, “God’s Gardeners,” who live a Thoreau-like existence in makeshift urban communes. The leader of the Gardeners, an ascetic prophet named Adam One...