It has a lot to do with the class system and asserting yourself as an individual. It has nothing to do with theories of feminism. And we are very pleased when Elizabeth Bennet faces her down and tells her to piss off and mind her own business. Lady Catherine in Pride and Prejudice, she's very bad, but she's a woman. But that doesn't mean they're going to be that way. Yes, they may be expected to be a particular way. I've never bought into any sort of hard and fast, this-box/that-box characterization.

It was so that the snips-and-snails-and-puppy-dog-tails nasty boys wouldn't pull the pigtails of the girls, who were of course engaged in their own byzantine, evil plotting.

I'm from the generation that had the boys door and the girls door when you went to school, and you got in big trouble if you went in the wrong one. At times during our conversation – her first with a Canadian newspaper in anticipation of the publication of On a recent hot and sunny afternoon, around the corner from her home in Toronto's well-appointed Annex neighbourhood, Atwood met with up with me at a bustling café patio – to which she arrived an hour late, though to her credit, she had phoned 30 minutes into my waiting to belatedly warn me she was running behind. And for all their SF fireworks, all the world-building pyrotechnics, they are quietly realistic stories that recognize that any future the world can hope to have will be one of adaptation and synthesis, of our learning to live better with those around us to make the most of the diminished circumstances in which we're likely to find ourselves. They are frank and ugly books but also funny and beautiful. The trilogy is one of the most impressive achievements in contemporary literature, and stands as a grand document of humanity's greatest failings but also a moving celebration of our greatest possibilities. With the publication of MaddAddam next week, she concludes her epic account of what happens in the wake of the end, after her 'waterless flood' has scrubbed the planet clean, leaving behind only a handful of people – or, at least, only a handful we know of – to survive in a landscape populated by fearsome pigoons (angry pigs genetically altered to grow human organs). The first volume in a trilogy, it was followed by The Year of the Flood, which, in a bit of remarkable narrative showing-off, offered a completely different story that unfolded concurrently with Oryx and Crake. Oryx and Crake was a revelation: a harrowing vision of society gone terribly wrong, and a reminder that Atwood, author of the classic dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale, is one of the best speculative-fiction writers alive. Ten years ago, Margaret Atwood ended the world, and in rather spectacular fashion.

Margaret atwood dystopian trilogy