Have a few minutes and are curious about the book Margaret Atwood wishes she had written herself?

Alongside is a recent and short interview but, be warned, she does a better job of deflecting questions than answering them (all in good-humoured fashion).

Admittedly, I was drawn to watch for Graham Norton too; I didn’t know he had time for a book club with his important judging duties for Drag Race UK.

I also didn’t realize that Amitav Ghosh had written non-fiction as well as novels like his Ibis Trilogy. And this is how one book leads to another because the Ghosh passage quoted below is what urged me to look for Sebastião Salgado’s Gold (truly amazing, catch a glimpse in the image alongside, with Premee Mohamed’s Beneath the Rising, which I was hoping would make a good companion for Ashby’s novel).

But here is Amitav Ghosh commenting on how writers confront the subject of the climate crisis, on the stories they tell and the stories left untold, in The Great Derangement (2016):

“For the arts, oil is inscrutable in a way that coal never was: the energy that petrol generates is easy to aestheticize—as in images and narratives of roads and cars—but the substance itself is not. Its sources are mainly hidden from sight, veiled by technology, and its workers are hard to mythologize, being largely invisible. As for the places where oil is extracted, they possess nothing of the raw visual power that is manifest, for example, in the mining photographs of Sebastião Salgado. Oil refineries are usually so heavily fortified that little can be seen of them other than a distant gleam of metal, with tanks, pipelines, derricks, glowing under jets of flame.”

That same year, Madeline Ashby’s Company Town (2016) was published—another of the books that Margaret Atwood has recommended (in a Twitter thread)—and it’s an exception to Ghosh’s rule, because she does scrutinize the oil industry, situating her character on an east-coast oil rig, with a near-future, near-city feel.

Hwa is sharply defined and sharp-tongued, and “while she was fluent in multiple languages, her mother-tongue was cursing. She had no time for corporate lore, or fairy tales, which were apparently the same thing these days.” The world-building is dovetailed into the story, primarily through character-building though also through the setting of New Arcadia. Readers are gradually immersed in this new world via Hwa, in much the same way we sink into Ann Leckie’s or Maureen McHugh’s world-building.

Hwa is not augmented which, of course, begs an unasked question. “Augmented people were so upright about their augmentations. As though everyone around them actually gave a damn. As though learning about what they’d fixed could really tell you anything about the places they were broken.” And, in that quiet way, readers are actually still learning more about Hwa, through her perspective on other people.

The setting feels both familiar and disorienting. “It was still warm, so they are in the Autumn Garden on Level Twenty of Tower Two, where there were trees whose leaves actually turned. The maples were planted even before the crops on the farm floors. On a plaque pounded into one tree were the logos of the tree scientists and mental health agencies that had funded the forest.”

There’s enough of the present-day for readers to situate themselves. For instance, “sometimes the riggers took things to keep them awake, and some of them were on off-label mods, the kinds of things Wade was taking, and Christ, anything could happen there.”

Hwa’s tone and the authorial observations have a distinct flavour and, at times, she channels elements of her identity to influence situations: “Hwa let her accent thicken. Let him know she was for real. That she was town, through and through. “I’m not trying to hire you for a job, or anything. I’s not asking you to steal something, or hurt somebody. That’s not why I’s here.”

There’s a science-y feel to the story, bubbling up from beneath, gentle and persistent. But story swells above all that; readers are immediately drawn into the action. In the opening pages, Hwa intervenes in a dangerous situation, offering protection to a young woman who doesn’t have the same freedoms that Hwa enjoys in that moment.

We’re on-side straight away, and it’s the connection with her character that acclimates us to her world. The women in this story are vulnerable and fierce; they are victimized but refuse to be victims; they claim their independence and agency, even in impossible situations. (When they do not survive, Hwa’s dedication to unearthing the truth surrounding their deaths is key.)

Company Town is a quick, engaging read, just under three hundred pages, peppered with adrenalin-fuelled scenes and underscored with a tinge of darkness; the ambivalence of corporate control adds a consistent tension and the developing relationships intensify readers’ investment in wanting secrets to be exposed, in wanting loyalty to be rewarded, in wanting individuals to triumph against the odds.

Ashby and Atwood met several years before. In a 2020 interview, Ashby describes “answering questions put to me by a fact-checker from the Wall Street Journal, after Margaret Atwood said they should talk to me about robots, science fiction, and the future.” The recommendation stemmed from their 2013 acquaintance when Ashby was touring for vN (a novel in her Machine Dynasty trilogy)

“This was how Margaret and I met — we did an appearance together with Corey Redekop at the Kingston WritersFest back home in Canada. She had gently steered the interview in the way only she can, and said, ‘Now, Madeline, having read your book, I must ask: how old were you when you first saw The Wizard of Oz?’ Oh, I thought. She gets it. Of course she does. She’s Margaret Fucking Atwood.”

Ashby is an author as well as a “freelance consulting futurist specializing in scenario development and science fiction prototypes.” She considers Company Tower a “cyber-noir novel” and has published non-fiction too. (More about her, and some videos too, here.) It’s not hard to see the appeal of her work for someone like Margaret Atwood, whose love of ‘50s science-fiction influenced works as disparate as The Blind Assassin and The Heart Goes Last.

This week, I’ve segued from a Twitter recommendation that, beneath the surface, was rooted in a respectful relationship between two writers, one of whom had the capacity to draw the attention of editors towards the other, an emerging thinker and storyteller. Next week, another book recommended in Margaret Atwood’s twitter stream, by a peer whose themes often overlap and align with themes that dominate Atwood’s fiction too. You’ll see…

And, how about you—have you been celebrating MARM? Was there cake?