Set in the future, The Year of the Flood tells the story of the build-up to and aftermath of a pandemic known as the Waterless Flood, which all but eradicates the human race. The environment the survivors are left with is extremely inhospitable: Earth’s natural resources are long depleted, and the flora and fauna that remain are made up of genetically spliced, hybrid organisms such as rakunks (rats crossed with skunks), pigoons (hybrid pigs resembling balloons because they’re stuffed with duplicate human transplant organs), and liobams (lions forced not just to lie down with lambs but to integrate with them biologically) — not to mention soydines, chickeanpeas and beananas.
Margaret Atwood’s 2003 novel Oryx and Crake was set in the same post-apocalyptic world, and several characters from it reappear here. Atwood famously asserts that these speculative fictions (her preferred term) differ from sci-fi because they take place in a plausible future, i.e.,
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