A “joke-filled romp” through end times: Radical environmentalism, deep ecology, and human extinction in Margaret Atwood’s eco-apocalyptic <i>MaddAddam</i> trilogy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canadian writer Margaret Atwood has spent years thinking and writing about the existential threat humanity now confronts in an era of an exponential growth in the global human population, accelerating environmental and habitat destruction, mass extinctions of plant and animal species, and ever-worsening ecological degradation. Like her 2003 novel Oryx and Crake, which Atwood describes as a “joke-filled romp through the end of the human race”, her 2009 novel The Year of the Flood and her 2013 novel MaddAddam are admonitory satires. In MaddAddam, Atwood moves forward from The Year of the Flood and Oryx and Crake as she retells and reconsiders her dystopian eco-apocalyptic account of what leads up to and what follows mass human extinction. In her account of the apocalyptic and millennial environmentalism of Crake and the God’s Gardeners, Atwood draws on the philosophy of deep ecology, and she also invokes the type of radical environmentalism embraced by activist green movements like Earth First!. Intent on environmental consciousness-raising, Atwood offers a horrific and darkly satiric account of the gruesome final days of humanity in the twenty-first century. By wryly suggesting that the remedy to humanity’s ills lies not only in interspecies cooperation but also in interspecies breeding, Atwood engages her readers in an unsettling thought experiment as Crake’s genetically modified hominoids, which are presented in Oryx and Crake as a kind of mad scientist joke, become the best hope for the genetic survival of some vestige of homo sapiens in the future Craker–human hybrid.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".