“TIME TO GO”: THE POST-APOCALYPTIC
AND THE POST-TRAUMATIC IN MARGARET
ATWOOD’S ORYX AND CRAKE
KATHERINE V. SNYDER
Any fictional text, however realistic, portrays a world that is not real. But
speculative fiction—as Margaret Atwood designates her futurist, dystopian
novels, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Oryx and Crake (2003), and The Year
of the Flood (2009)—offers a particular and explicit challenge to its readers’
sense of the temporal distance separating the fictional mise-en-scène from the
contemporary real world. Dystopian speculative fiction takes what already
e