Status Updates From Burning Questions: Essays a...

This is a tough one… Not really enjoying most of the pieces here…

“Human beings do have an alarming tendency to butcher others of their kind. We inhabitants of Mashupzyx feel sorry for you. You cause one another such grief and pain, and a lot of you never seem to have much fun at all.”

I lost count of the many instances of the same bit throughout these essays, where Atwood claims she was just goofing around with a new genre and accidentally wrote The Handmaid’s Tale yet less to her bemusement each time her Land of Gilead becomes more alarmingly like the United States slipping into the same sort of theocracy she anticipated. Other dystopia get glanced at, such as Zamyatin’s We.

“Perhaps our largest failure is severing ourselves from the universe. We are a part of Nature: we are not apart from it. Does Nature need us? No. Do we need Nature? Yes. Chemistry and physics don’t negotiate, but they do balance their own books. Physics and chemistry do not give second chances.”