There was much talk—and there might easily have been more—about Pattern Recognition’s being legible as a 9/11 novel. The event is manifestly significant for the novel plot-wise, but also to the extent that it informs the book’s disrupted sense of history. It’s interesting, then, that Oryx and Crake was conceived under similar circumstances—might it then be possible to read this book as a response to 9/11?

As we discussed in our first class on Pattern Recognition, the composition of Gibson’s book was interrupted by the attacks on the World Trade Center towers. In “My Life in Science Fiction,” Atwood gives a similar account. What’s of note, then, is how differently the writers respond, how differently they adapt their respective works in progress to reflect what feels to them a different world.

I don’t think I need to say much about how significant Gibson’s work clearly thinks 9/11 is. Although it’s only, like, a thirtieth of the book, it pervades the rest in really palpable ways.

By contrast, Atwood responds by taking a culturally inward turn. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the closest we get to the quasi-apocalyptic act that catalyzed the sociopolitical lockdown that’s the novel’s main interest is a vague reference to Islamic terrorists. As Atwood notes in her essay, though, “It’s deeply unsettling when you’re writing about a fictional catastrophe and a real one happens.”

Formally, this novel works pretty similarly to the earlier one. We’re immediately plunged into a nightmare scenario. There’s cognitive estrangement to the extent that the reader is madly palpating the conventions and limits both official and personal in this new and utterly bizarre world. As in THT, we’ve the general sense that something really, truly awful happened that precipitated the mess we’re witnessing; as in THT, we’re given no clues as to what that might be. At least to begin with.

Given this formal structure, one would assume that the nature of the event itself—whatever it was that gave rise to the new order as it exists in the novel—would be rather more malleable. In which case—and given Atwoods concerns as voiced in her earlier novel—isn’t it all the stranger that Atwoods imaginary apocalypse in Oryx and Crake comes from within, rather than from without?

Still, the result is much the same. For Gibson, 9/11 causes a rupture in history. When he represents the event in his novel, he switches tenses. London functions as a displaced metropolis—the novel is really about New York. The book does everything it can to disconnect us from time and space, as mimetic of mass trauma.

Oryx and Crake does basically the same things. On the first page, time is the primary question. A question of basic orientation, of order—“Out of habit he looks at his watch”; “It causes a jolt of terror to run through him, this absence of official time”; “Nobody nowhere knows what time it is.”

Whether she chooses to represent the events themselves or no, I’d suggest that Atwood observes a mass dislocation of space and time as a consequence of 9/11 as Gibson does.