Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy: Postmodernism, Apocalypse, and Rapture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Who sees in Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy is fairly clear; who tells is trickier. In a subtle move at the end of the novel MaddAddam , Atwood gives the entire narration to the Crakers—either through compilation or through narration itself. Mirroring the palindrome that is its title, Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy subtly plays a trick on its readers: its ending is its beginning, making Oryx and Crake aesthetically the later text (written at a later time). The ending of MaddAddam then sends us back to Oryx and Crake not only for its narrative complexities, but for the seeds of our apocalypse. Although the roads to apocalypse are many, the driving force behind the many worthy apocalyptic causes in this trilogy is the once-subversive postmodernism, now co-opted by corporate ends. Contrary to the plethora of reassurances that “it will be fine tomorrow,” the trilogy leaves little hope within the parameters of its narrative. As dramatized in Atwood’s Payback , any hope is left to the reader who must then piece through the fragments and ruins in order to stave off an apocalypse not quite yet come. Indeed, this trilogy could easily be seen as The Waste Land of the 21st century.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".