ATWOOD, Margaret (Eleanor)

(1939-)

   Canadian poet and novelist, some of whose poetry, like Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein (1966 chap US), hints at sf content; but her interest as a prose writer in the form was minimal until the publication of THE HANDMAID'S TALE (1985), which won the Governor General's Award in Canada and the first ARTHUR C.CLARKE AWARD in 1986. The 1990 film version (THE HANDMAID'S TALE) stiffly travestied the book, treating it as an improbable but ideologically correct DYSTOPIA, rather than as a fluid nightmare requiem in the vein of George ORWELL's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949). The tale of Offred the Handmaid, contextually placed as it is within a frame dated 200 years later, reads overwhelmingly as a personal tragedy. The venue is dystopian - a sudden loss of fertility has occasioned a pre-emptive NEAR FUTURE coup against all remaining fertile women by a fundamentalist New England, to keep them from power - and the lessons taught throughout have a sharp FEMINIST saliency. But Offred's liquid telling of her tale, and her ambivalent disappearance into death or liberation as the book closes, make for a novel whose context leads, liberatingly, out of nightmare into the pacific Inuit culture of the frame. Despite the occasional infelicity - MA's attempts at the language of GENRE SF are not unembarrassing - THE HANDMAID'S TALE soon gained a reputation as the best sf novel ever produced by a Canadian.

   See also: CANADA; SATIRE; WOMEN SF WRITERS.