Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood’s gothic tale of biotechnological disaster, spends most of its 376 pages building up to the revelation of What Happened. Her amiable narrator, Snowman, knows What ...

Don’t call the novel Oryx and Crake a work of sci-fi. Author Margaret Atwood prefers the term “speculative fiction”—she says the things she writes about depict a plausible version of the future.

Atwood has visited the future before, in her dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale. In her latest, the future is even bleaker. The triple whammy of runaway social inequality, genetic technology and ...