All this will seem troublingly unoriginal not just to hardened SF fans, but to anyone with an average movie-going habit. The dystopian world that existed before the pandemic is seen in flashback: a nightmare of all-controlling corporations, out-of-control scientific innovations, ecological catastrophe and social breakdown which is equally familiar, from the likes of Blade Runner, Minority Report, The Hunger Games and countless others. I use Survivors – itself a remake of a 1970s series – as an example, but the post-apocalyptic sections of Atwood's books have many precursors, from Mad Max to The Omega Man and 28 Days Later. A mad scientist working for an evil corporation releases a virus that wipes out most of humanity the survivors must scrape a living from the ruins of industrial civilisation, fighting against feral gangs and sometimes each other. It is a peculiarity – a series of books written by a wonderful and justly venerated novelist, with a generic SF plot that closely recalls, say, the unloved recent BBC1 series Survivors. Banks's thoughts came back to me while I was reading Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy, which concludes with this novel.
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