from Scott Thill at Wired

For a speculative-fiction visionary who writes about bioengineered catastrophe, commodified humanity and environmental devastation, Margaret Atwood is one seriously sunny personality.

“I’m an optimist,” the decorated Canadian author explained by phone to Wired.com during a tour for her most recent book, The Year of the Flood, published in September. “Anyone who writes this kind of stuff probably is. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t waste your time writing the books.”

Wired.com: You come at science convincingly from the direction of fiction, and you’re pretty precise about your work, which you maintain is speculative fiction rather than sci-fi.

Margaret Atwood: I like exact labeling. Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see. We can do the lineage: Sci-fi descends from H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds; speculative fiction descends from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

Wired.com: But merges exist, aside from the historical designations.

Atwood: Well, there’s a crossover park where sci-fi and fantasy play together. But it’s really just a question of who is related to whom. If you could do a DNA of books, you could trace the classifications of these kinds of writing.

Read the full interview here

I’ve also heard Ray Bradbury say that he isn’t Science Fiction, what he does is just fiction.  These are the kind of books that blur the lines of Sci Fi and Fantasy in a really interesting way. Have to love a book that makes you think, right?

What do you think of speculative and dystopian novels? Do you prefer more postive books?