It is into this speculative category that Atwood’s most recent fiction, the serialized novel Positron, falls. Published in episodes online by Byliner, at the time of this interview three segments had been released. As with her other speculative works, Positron centers on a futuristic dystopian United States, and explores myriad issues of invasive control over personal lives. In all her fiction (and much of her other writing, in fact), Atwood is a relentless interrogator of the many faces of oppression, manifested in misogyny and the control of women’s bodies and reproductive systems, in environmental destruction, in animal cruelty, in institutional corruption of insurance companies, governments and marketing, and in the quieter—yet at times, even more deadly—power struggles that exist in intimate relationship.
