The award-winning author of The Handmaid's Tale is coming to Christchurch to share her thoughts on how evil flourishes and eventually dies.
After 34 years, Atwood has written a sequel to The Handmaid's Tale called The Testaments, which was one of the winners of this year's Book Prize. She will be discussing the book at the Christchurch Town Hall on February 12.
She said she used climate change as a backdrop for The Handmaid's Tale because she grew up among biologists.
"They'd been talking about it [climate change] since the 50s. So, it wasn't news to me ... fairly suddenly in recent years it's made its way from the science journals to the front pages of newspapers, because now we're beginning to see the catastrophic results more frequently."
She said many didn't want to believe there was a climate crisis because it was inconvenient, sometimes because there was money invested.
"You get to a point in all of this in which money is worthless."
She also recommends reading Fascism: A Warning by Madeleine Albright, which lays out how different regimes affect the people they govern.
"We know from The Handmaid's Tale that Gilead did disappear otherwise they wouldn't be having a seminar on it in which its the subject of historical study. We're told, however, in the book how it came to crumble and one of the interests in The Testaments is finding out how that might have come about."
She said just being angry about a situation wasn't enough to bring about change.
"Anger can be a motivation, but it's not a justification for an action. In itself, it doesn't solve things. You have to do the hard work of structural change if you're serious about the things you're angry about."
