I just finished reading another Margaret Atwood novel, The Year of the Flood. This well known Canadian author has a view of the world that is very "dystopian"???? She puts us in the not-too-distant future and weaves a tale of what our world might be like. Suffice to say her view can be very troubling....and make you think.
On page 282 I read a paragraph that really made me pause. "The next day, two bad things happened. First I turned on the news. The minor epidemic they'd been talking about earlier wasn't behaving in the usual way - a local outbreak, one they could contain. Now it was an emergency. They showed a map of the world, with the hotspots lighting up in red - Brazil, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, Bombay, Paris, Berlin - it was like watching the planet being spraygunned. It was an eruptive plague, they said, and the thing was spreading fast - no, not even spreading, breaking out at the same time in cities far apart, which wasn't the normal pattern. Ordinarily the Corps would have called for lies and cover-ups, and we'd hear something like the real stories only in rumors, so the fact that all this was right out there on the news showed how serious it was - the Corps couldn't keep the lid on.
The news jockeys were trying to keep calm. The experts didn't know what the superbug was, but it was a pandemic for sure, and a lot of people were dying fast - just sort of melting. As soon as they said, 'No need for panic,' in that eerie calm tone with those glued-on smiles, I could tell it was really serious."
The story continues: " The next day the news was even worse. The plague was spreading, and there was rioting and looting, and killing gonig on, and the CorpSeCorps had just more or less vanished: they must have been dying too.
And a few days after that, there wasn't any more news."
Frankly I read those paragraphs twice. Then I went to the front of the book.
Atwood wrote the novel in 2009.
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