This evening I attended an event in Bath organized by Toppings. It was a reading by Margaret Atwood who is on tour promoting the paperback release of Madaddam and her new short story collection, The Stone Mattress.

Atwood began by reading from one of the stories in The Stone Mattress, which was hilarious. She said later on Twitter that she’d not read from that story before. If you go to one of her future events, ask her to read from it again.

The bits she read from Madaddam all involved Toby trying to communicate with the Crakers. Well, the Crakers might have rabbit genes, but I have cat genes and I’m always tempted to swat them about a bit. If the Crakers are the future of monkey-kind, I suspect I shall have no qualms about eating them.

Then again, they are very funny.

I had a brief chat with Atwood about the Cheltenham dystopias panel while I was getting my books signed. As it happens, she has an essay in In Other Worlds on the subject of utopian and dystopian fiction, which I had already read, so that’s her input to the panel sorted. (She is in Cheltenham on Saturday, but only very briefly for her own appearance.)

On learning that I blogged about books, Atwood recommend that I read Chuck Wendig (who of course I know of) and Titou Le Coq (who appears to blog only in French, but I can make an effort at understanding that).

If you happen to be reading this, Margaret, I recommend that you try Kameron Hurley, Aliette de Bodard, N.K. Jemisin and Madeline Ashby.