Imagining Beyond Extinctathon: Indigenous Knowledge, Survival, Speculation – Margaret Atwood’s and Ann Patchett’s Eco-Gothic
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Both Margaret Atwood and Ann Patchett engage with issues concerning indigenous knowledge, biodiversity, and survival. Margaret Atwood constructs a form of wilderness Gothic in Surfacing (1972) and Survival (1972); while in her darker eco-Gothic texts, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and the MaddAddam trilogy (Oryx and Crake [2003]; The Year of the Flood [2009]; MaddAddam [2013]), she focuses on survival post holocaust. Atwood’s work is influenced by indigenous knowledge and the awareness of imminent disaster should people fall out of harmony with nature, a threat enacted in these Canadian eco-Gothic dystopian fictions. This threat of extinction, of natural disaster based on arrogantly, deliberately, or accidentally ignoring the importance of ecological diversity and balance, informs much of Atwood's writing. Her work emphasises contestation, different voices and ways of being, throughout her writing career and her everyday life. Indigenous knowledge also interests many other women writers, including Ann Patchett from the US (State of Wonder [2011]), Alexis Wright from Australia (The Swan Book [2013]), Patricia Grace from New Zealand, (Baby No-Eyes [1998]), and Nalo Hopkinson from Jamaica/Toronto (“A Habit of Waste” [2001]); each of whom recognizes the importance of diversity, explores threats to survival, and suggests ways forward. Several of these writers, including Ann Patchett, evidence Atwood’s influence on a younger generation of women writers. In this essay, I link Atwood’s work to that of Ann Patchett, specifically to her novel State of Wonder, which problematizes the involvement of nonindigenous with indigenous people and their tribal behaviors, beliefs, and the rich forest and jungle worlds where they live in balanced harmony. Atwood and Patchett bring gender and sustainability issues to the fore by their use of eco-Gothic, emphasizing the damage done to natural processes (including fertility) by exploitation and unnatural controls. Both authors highlight lessons to be learned from indigenous values, behaviors, and wisdom, without underestimating the difficulties of translation, and the vulnerability of the peoples and their environments. Each shows the damage of their misuse or loss.
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.
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 | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it