an interview with Margaret Atwood
Privatisation and ownership are key issues in the book, too?
Yes. I also postulate what is already happening: public space has been more or less given up for lost. Security is now a matter of gated communities. Instead of having people living in one place and commuting, which has now become too unsafe, in the book they’ve got the mall within the walls, like castles. Corporations want to prevent knowledge theft and raiding, because everything is now completely commercialised. That means the profit motive is the only motive. There is no more pure science, but if you’ve looked at a university recently you know that the people who get the grants are the people that large corporations think might be doing something useful for them. What you have mostly is people thieving from graduate students, as it were. The students do the work, the guy puts his name on it and collects the rewards, but not in my book. Things are better in some respects: if the students invent something, they get to collect on it, which makes them very inventive.