Arguing Against Ice Cream

Atwood, Margaret. "Arguing Against Ice Cream: Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age by Bill McKibben." Review of ENOUGH: Staying Human in an Engineered Age.[1] The New York Review of Books, 12 June 2003. Collected Moving Targets: Writing with Intent, 1982-2004. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2004: 339-50. Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose 1983-2005 New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers/Perseus Books, 2005: 294-304.[2] Also collected In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. NYC: Doubleday, 2011.[3]

Discussed briefly in a review of Atwood's In Other Worlds by Daniel Lukes in Utopian Studies 23.1 (2012): 290-94. Lukes says Atwood "concurs with McKibben's plea against market-driven technoscientific models of human perfectionism: the utopian desires for bodily optimization and immortality [...]. These desires, if implemented, warns Atwood, will provoke a two-tier society of the 'GenRich' and the 'GenPoor,' the latter sooner or later bound to 'get hold of some pitchforks and torches and storm the barricades. To avoid the peasants, we'll have to go into outer space. Having fun yet?'" (p. 293).

RDE, finishing, 28Mar23