New Atwood

margaret atwood, a photo by Anne Smyth (bebbers.ca) on Flickr.

Reasons to be happy: Margaret Atwood has a new book out and it's a collection of essays, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination

Reasons to be sad: this last bit from an interview with Jascha Hoffman:

I’m past the age when things scare me. But if I were younger, I would be looking down the line with some apprehension. A world with more than 9 billion people is not going to be very habitable. We’ve already used 90% of the fish in the sea. Global warming will make it worse: more droughts, more extreme weather and limited harvests. People think they will fix the problem with technology, but famine may fix it for us. Either way it will be a pretty miserable life. The infinite inventiveness of humans sometimes makes me feel hopeful, but we’re just as capable of inventing horrible things as good things.