Canadian author Margaret Atwood is one of the world’s most celebrated living writers. Among her many books are a handful that some might call science fiction, notably The Handmaid’s Tale, about a future America ruled by religious fundamentalists, and the Oryx and Crake trilogy, about a mad scientist who attempts to replace humanity with a genetically engineered race of his own creation. Atwood has sometimes provoked the ire of science fiction fans by declining to label these works as “science fiction.”

“It’s a matter of truth in labeling,” says Margaret Atwood in this week’s episode of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “I like there to be some resemblance between what is promised on the outside and what you get on the inside, and if it says ‘science fiction,’ I want there to be something that doesn’t already exist.”

For her own books, she prefers the term “speculative fiction,” which she defines as stories set on Earth and employing elements that already exist in some form, like genetic engineering, as opposed to more wildly hypothetical science fiction ideas like time travel, faster-than-light drives, and transporters. The problem is that science fiction writers have long used “speculative fiction” as an umbrella term for a wide range of non-realistic stories. Atwood and her friend Ursula K. Le Guin have engaged in a long-running debate over such differences in terminology.

“We did in fact do an on-stage conversation,” says Atwood, “when I published In Other Worlds, and in the preface to that book you can find that matter discussed. She was a naughty Ursula.”

Listen to our complete interview with Margaret Atwood in Episode 94 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above), in which she explains how to invent your own religion, reveals which dystopian future she fears most, and describes how her novel MaddAddam inspired the real-life video game Intestinal Parasites. Then stick around after the interview as bestselling authors Paolo Bacigalupi and Tobias Buckell join hosts John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley for a panel discussion on political agendas in science fiction.

Margaret Atwood on the science fiction community:

“Jonathan Lethem actually wrote quite a good piece about this a little while ago, about hanging out with the sci-fi cultists whose worldview is probably a bit out of date now, because it was presupposed on ‘Literary people scorn us. They won’t let us into their clubhouse, so we’re not going to let them into ours.’ But when you have the New Yorker doing a science fiction issue, I would say that that particular door is no longer closed. And it should never have been closed in the first place, because you cannot write a history of prose narrative in the twentieth century without including H.G. Wells, without Brave New World, without 1984. Those are key books of the century, I would say.”

Margaret Atwood on real-life dystopias:

“I’m about to review a book that takes on another version of Brave New World, our version, the version that we find ourselves enmeshed in even as we speak. And that would be the ability to track and, as it were, ‘publish’ everyone all the time … The book is by Dave Eggers and it’s called The Circle, and it’s coming out in October. But that is what’s concerning us right now, because of the revelations about data mining that have been done by, for instance, the U.S. government, and they’re not alone … I don’t know if you remember a play by Ionesco called ‘The Rhinoceros’? The idea is that if everyone could see everyone all the time, no one would ever do anything bad. But would that be such a good thing? Because what you’re actually proposing is a kind of paranoia-inducing crowd mentality.”

Tobias Buckell on his journey from moderate to contrarian:

“I used to think my work was politically centrist until it came out in the States, and I suddenly found myself described as a ‘multiculturist left-wing person of color who’s forcing it down everyone’s throats,’ and getting lots and lots of horrible hate mail from people who were determined to prove to me that black people would never get into space, they didn’t have the technical capacity, and I should stop writing stories about it … The reaction to publishing those books probably politicized me more than I was expecting, and has actually made me push back. I started out being way more of a milquetoast writer than I am today, working really hard not to piss everyone off, and now I take a certain glee in trying to piss everyone off, actually.”

Paolo Bacigalupi on the politics of Old Man’s War:

“A story that really went against my political value system was Old Man’s War by John Scalzi … The value system of the story is there’s perpetual war, humanity must fight in order to survive, the only solution is to fight, there are no other options … So I found the story extremely well-executed, but I found the politics almost comically cardboard in a lot of ways … And people can make a lot of assumptions about who John Scalzi is based on that book. And then if you go over and spend any time on his blog, you see the people who’ve read his books become extremely disappointed that John isn’t the right-wing, guns-blazing lunatic that Old Man’s War seems to [suggest]. And I find that interesting that here’s a book that doesn’t really reflect any of the nuance that he looks at the world with, and yet this is a creation of his which has gotten a huge amount of love and attention within science fiction.”