A pandemic is not a dystopia, Margaret Atwood recently said in an interview with the BBC. A dystopia is “an arranged unpleasant society you don’t want to be living in”— a frightening and usually totalitarian place. It is a cautionary tale that says, This is the house you could be living in if things continue this way. How do you like this house? But the COVID‑19 outbreak, she pointed out, is an emergency situation that, for all its terrifying and disagreeable aspects, was not deliberately engineered by malign forces trying to control us.
Despite the distinctions Atwood makes, it sometimes feels as though the lines between the world of fiction and the world of this epidemic are beginning to blur, and that we are all captive in an alarming story we are writing together. Maybe, pandemic-wise, this is the house we are already living in — a real-life dystopia playing out in real time. Indeed, Atwood admits that her own most famous foray into the genre...
Cecily Ross is an editor, novelist, and poet in Creemore, Ontario.
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