The author of "The Handmaid's Tale "and "Oryx and Crake" engagingly explores her
lifelong relationship to science fiction, both as a reader and as a writer.
At a time when the borders between literary genres are increasingly porous,
Margaret Atwood maps the richly fertile crosscurrents of speculative and science
fiction, slipstream, utopias and dystopias, and fantasy, and muses on their
roots in the age-old human impulse to imagine new worlds. She shares the
evolution of her personal fascination with this branch of literature, from her
days as a child inventing a race of flying superhero rabbits, to her graduate
study of the Victorian ancestors of SF