Margaret Atwood on our real-life dystopia: “What really worries me is creeping dictatorship”

[marmar]

(Salon) The down-on-their-luck protagonists of Margaret Atwood’s new novel “The Heart Goes Last” become fed up with living out of their car, so they move to a for-profit prison. It’s the near future, shortly after a new financial collapse, and Positron/Consilience — a gated community and a jail all in one — offers Charmaine and Stan the security of a comfortable middle-class existence, every other month; the inhabitants take turns being jailers living in houses and prisoners in cells.

This being a Margaret Atwood novel, things don’t work out quite the way poor Stan and Charmaine hope, but the author of the dystopias “The Handmaid’s Tale” and the Maddaddam trilogy (“Oryx and Crake,” “The Year of the Flood” and 2013’s “Maddaddam”) insists she has just tweaked what’s already happening in the world, including forced labor in prisons and the erosion of civil liberties — what she sees as the “creeping dictatorship” at home in Canada under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who’s up for election on Monday.

On the phone from a Brooklyn hotel, the ever-outspoken Atwood spoke with Salon about dystopias, robot sex and beer — in fiction and reality.

.....(snip).....

In the Maddaddam books, a pandemic wipes out so much of humanity; you carefully set out the details, whereas in “The Heart Goes Last,” the reason for society’s collapse is rather vague.

I think we pretty much do know what it was — it’s the same thing that happened in 2008, so it’s a financial collapse rather than a physical (one). People did end up on their front lawns and living in their cars, and that is apparently ongoing.

Do you see Positron/Consilience as a logical extension of current for-profit prisons?

The problem with for-profit prisons is that you need an endless supply of prisoners to make it profitable, so there’s no incentive to make it such that criminality is actually reduced. Ultimately you want more criminality; at the very least, you want to be able to define criminality in such a way that enough people get put in prison so you can make a profit out of them. There’s also a clause in the U.S. constitution that says you can’t use slave labor — except when convicted criminals are involved. So all of that is going on right now; (the book offers) just a little twist on it. .....................(more)

http://www.salon.com/2015/10/17/margaret_atwood_on_our_real_life_dystopia_what_really_worries_me_is_creeping_dictatorship/

[nashville_brook]

1. autorec for Atwood. :)

[NV Whino]

2. Love Atwood

And I hope her new liberal government improves things.

[libodem]

3. I was fortunate to hear her speak

At BSU last year. She's brilliant. My friend had 4 books for her to sign. I've only read 'Year of the Flood'.

[Cal Carpenter]

4. She's great

and despite the dire backdrop of her new book, it is actually a pretty fun read. I really enjoyed it.