Two generations ago when the American New Critics preached a concentration on "the work itself" (usually a poem) and a rejection of concerns with everything outside the work, one major item on their agenda was eliminating the author as an authority for "his" work, stressing that once works are completed their authors become mere readers of their own productions. That intrinsic approach has long since disappeared, especially with the commodifying of contemporary authors who have become primary marketers of their work, encouraged by publishers to spend weeks "on the road," doing readings, signing copies, granting interviews, and generally extending themselves as authorized readers of their most recent publications. As a best-selling novelist, Margaret Atwood is no exception, and on occasion she not only authorizes readings of her own fiction in public readings and in interviews but also writes an "Author's Afterword" to a novel such as Alias Grace, in that particular case teasing readers of her "whodunit" with the possibility she might provide further clues, as Author, to clarify whether Grace was actually guilty of murder. Recently in the publicizing of her novel Oryx and Crake, Atwood has emphasized that the novel functions as a "book end" to The Handmaid's Tale. Her encouragement of readers to connect these two examples of what she likes to term "speculative fiction" seems to provide a kind of carte blanche to read Oryx and Crake not only in connection with The Handmaid's Tale but in the context of her other ventures into SF, most notably in the novel-within-a-novel of The Blind Assassin. The circles of potential contextualizing widen out to include other fiction with which Oryx and Crake will inevitably be compared--Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World--as well as Atwood's own work that has been virtually from the beginning preoccupied with the theme of Survival.
