Status Updates From Burning Questions (Signed E...

Somber and more urgent the essays and introductions become, insisting that the audience gets the point that tyranny and ecological ruin can be avoided, but it seems from the current re-revival that her words fell onto deaf ears. Or maybe that was her Mashupzyxtian-Prospero plan all along to lull us into a false sense of security before enacting her Jacobean revenge plot through “a word after a word after a word.”

The prophetizing of a less humane age and the honouring of authors who might soon see their books banned, start to ramp up the closer each essay gets to the fateful date in 2016. Atwood’s hope that most of the modern world would wake up and do something to save what is left, whether it was a clever series of books, including her own greatest hits, makes it harder to see what might have been if key players listened.