Sci-fi, Cli-fi or Speculative Fiction: Genre and Discourse in Margaret Atwood’s “Three Novels I Won’t Write Soon”

Abstract

Margaret Atwood’s short prose piece, “Three Novels I Won’t Write Soon,” poses a conundrum for anyone seeking to place it within a genre. With features of science fiction, speculative fiction and a postmodern prose poem, the text addresses the topic of climate change and its concomitant fiction without offering closure. After examining and attempting to resolve the issue of genre, the paper aligns Atwood’s discourse of indeterminacy with the parallel discourse of climate change as expressed in science writing, in order to account for this text’s unusual structural and stylistic features.