The Handmaid's Tale: Three Literary Perspectives

This week I got to attend another excellent talk hosted by One Book One Northwestern: a panel discussion on the history and ongoing importance of Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. The panelists:

• Linda Bubon: co-founder of Women & Children First, the fantastic feminism-forward bookshop in Andersonville
• Juan Martinez: fiction writer, literature & writing professor at Northwestern
• Kasey Evans: critic, English professor at Northwestern

A very nice, insightful talk. Brief notes below:

Annalee Newitz @ Women & Children First

pic by CNSC member
Paul Callan (Flickr)

Back in September, Annalee Newitz did a reading at Women & Children First from her newly-launched novel, Autonomous. Brief notes below!

Newitz was joined by partner, fellow io9-cofounder, and All the Birds in the Sky author Charlie Jane Anders for the discussion. After reading  some introductory sections from Autonomous, which follows a scientist-turned-pharmacy-pirate and the robot/human pair of agents sent to stop her, Newitz took questions from the audience:

Taking a few questions about the process of writing the novel, and writing fiction instead of nonfiction:

• Autonomous started while both Newitz & Anders were still working on io9. She started working on it kind of as if it were nonfic, interviewed scientists in relevant fields. The novel is set in a definite near -future (2144), and relies on a fairly well-defined central device, the fictional concentration drug "Zacuity", so Newitz turned to a few different specialists to try to both flesh out the ideas and also avoid "smack your own face" fact errors. She also talked about her own disenchantment with the academic research world informing the novel.