Margaret Atwood (2 of 2): MaddAddam.

You know what I find interesting about "MaddAddam", the 3rd novel in Margaret Atwood's "Oryx and Crake" series?

First off, I love the series for how it plausibly extrapolates current trends, esp. in genetic engineering (e.g. Chicken Nubbins or something like that, where chickens are modified to be digestive tracts with nodes that you can cut off and easily process into nuggets).

Second off, I find it interesting how much she *didn't* anticipate, and how she then incorporated a bunch of stuff into the 3rd novel that really wasn't around or that much in public consciousness for the first two, e.g. (I think, I may be wrong here with a few):

- drones.
- smartphones and their cases.
- phones that take pictures.
- synthetic meat grown in laboratories.

Oddly, those new things that she incorporated really leapt out at me, and made me feel like her imagined world wasn't wholly consistent, since its contents shifted over time.

On that note, I just want to say for the record that I'm a strong defender of J.K. Rowling: her imagined world of Harry Potter is unbelievable, and I'm a strong fan of both her plotting and morally nuanced characters.

Criticism of her prose style is really overdone, and tells you more about the pretensions of her critics than her actual writing.