Pigs With Six Kidneys.(Margaret Atwood calls her latest book, "Oryx and Crake" speculative fiction)(Biography)

Though some of history's edgiest writers--including George Orwell and Aldous Huxley--created scary, dystopic novels, none has had the temerity to pull off two conflicting visions of the future. Except for Margaret Atwood. In her 1985 best- seller "The Handmaid's Tale," the Canadian novelist depicted a world in the aftermath of nuclear catastrophe, where the few fertile women left were enslaved as breeding machines for a state ruled by religious fundamentalists. Now, with her 11th novel, "Oryx and Crake" (384 pages. Bloomsbury), Atwood has concocted a second futuristic fable, exploring a brutal world ravaged by climate change and populated by genetically modified animals and hubristic scientists.

Atwood attributes her changing vision of the future to scientific advances. Everything that happens in "Oryx and Crake," she says, is within the realm of possibility. She thus considers her latest novel "speculative"--that is, imaginable in this world--rather than science fiction. While writing "Oryx and Crake," she compiled a box of newspaper clippings from which she drew inspiration. "[The book] contains nothing humans haven't done, or aren't think-ing about doing," she told a spellbound audience in May at Hay-on-Wye, the site of Britain's best-known literary festival. In "Oryx and Crake," the terrifying beasts of Atwood's dark imagination take the form of pigs growing five or six kidneys to be harvested for human transplants, and chickens producing 12 drumsticks each.

Atwood's unusual upbringing may help explain her provocative point of view. Born in November 1939, she has had her work shaped by her experience of war as well as her unorthodox childhood. Each spring she set off with her parents and older brother to live for several months at the forest-insect research station that her father ran in northern Quebec. She was home-schooled, and her early lessons in wilderness survival are echoed in "Oryx and Crake": the narrator, Jimmy, struggles against a lawless, ecologically devastated world. She also draws upon the experience in her 1989 novel "Cat's Eye," in which a lonely little girl named Elaine--who retreats with her family into the woods each spring--is isolated from her friends and vulnerable to their cruelties. Indeed, one of Atwood's favorite themes is the power childhood experience wields over adult lives. "[Children's] emotions are very intense because you don't think you have any other choices," she says over tea at London's Groucho ...