PELEE ISLAND, Ontario — Canada’s most celebrated author was in the middle of Lake Erie last week, eager to talk about dystopia — but not the one attracting most of the attention from her fans recently.

Margaret Atwood, whose books include the best-selling 1985 novel “The Handmaid’s Tale,” lives in Toronto but has a cottage on quiet Pelee Island, just a stone’s skip across the border from Ohio’s Bass Islands.

The avid conservationist had just wrapped up Springsong, an annual bird-watching and authors event she founded 15 years ago to benefit the Pelee Island Heritage Centre.

Pelee Island, Atwood noted, is a major stopover for birds migrating across Lake Erie.

“Birds, especially migratory birds, are like an early-warning radar system,” she said. “When things are going wrong with their habitats and their numbers are declining, that’s a wake-up call.”

And, according to Atwood, everyone should be wide awake about threats to the environment.

“Why?" she said. "If they don’t get interested in it pretty soon, the oceans and soil will be dead and we will cease to breathe — in a nutshell.”

In other words, an environmental dystopia.

A much different dystopia is portrayed in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” in which a theocracy has taken over the United States, reducing women to the role of servants and slaves. A popular TV series based on the novel premiered in April on the streaming service Hulu and has been renewed for a second season.

Many fans of the book and series — as well as the 77-year-old Atwood herself — find a disturbing resonance between events in “The Handmaid’s Tale” and current political events, including the election of President Donald Trump.

“It wouldn’t be so interesting to people right now if the situation were other than it is,” she said.

Talking about a 32-year-old novel, she said, “hasn’t become annoying yet." But she does find some of the phenomena related to its reborn popularity “kind of weird,” including the legions of fans who dress in the blood-red robes and white bonnets of the main character, Offred.

“It’s become its own recognizable thing,” Atwood said. “Once you have a 'Saturday Night Live' skit done about it, it’s a 'thing.'”

Atwood wrote an environmental dystopian trilogy — “Oryx and Crake,” “The Year of the Flood” and “MaddAddam” — that was published between 2003 and 2013.

“And, boy, are we heading in that direction."

Books such as “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Oryx and Crake” are meant to be cautionary tales, she said.

“You write a book like that hoping that this will not come to pass. That’s the position of those (dystopian) books. Orwell writes ‘1984’ so that England will not develop into this society that he has described.”

Volume 3 of Atwood's “Angel Catbird” graphic-novel series (with art by Johnnie Christmas) — written for all ages but aimed at young readers — will be released in July.

She's having a bit more unbridled fun with this latest project, although it does have the serious environmental message that free-roaming cats are major killers of migratory songbirds.

“You can’t say to cat lovers, 'Flush your cat down the toilet because it’s a dangerous predator of birds' — that’s not going to fly," she said with a laugh.

“Having been a cat person for dozens of years, I know that. What better solution than to create this superhero that’s part cat and part bird?”

“I grew up in the ’40s with comic books,” Atwood explained.

In those 1940s comics, her hero would have been mutated by falling into a vat of chemicals, she said. In the 1950s, he would have been atomically irradiated. In the 21st century, he has an accident with a super gene-splicer.

“So we have a collision between a cat, a bird and a guy who comes out of the collision with wings and a tail, as one does.”

A graphic novel “seemed the best form to do what I wanted to do, which was to create a positive conversation around cats and birds that wouldn’t just annoy the heck out of cat people,” she said.

“And there’s nothing that influences families’ behavior around their pets like agitated, involved 10-year-olds.”

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sstephens@dispatch.com

@SteveStephens