Nathaniel Rich

“Is prescience a literary virtue?” asked Martin Amis, in his introduction to J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (a runner-up for this list, along with Amis’s Einstein’s Monsters). The answer, Amis correctly concludes, is “a cheerful no.” Still much of the thrill of Atwood’s trilogy lies in her unique ability to dramatize, and satirize, the uncanniness of the future we are inheriting.