Margaret Atwood’s most recent novel The Year of the Flood is a continuation of Oryx and Crake, the 2003 dystopian masterpiece that she calls ‘speculative fiction’ (as opposed to ‘science fiction’).

Whatever these novels are called, they are compelling and brilliantly rendered. Both novels have been compared to classics like 1984 and Brave New World and are destined to become prophetic texts for our age. Atwood is fast becoming to the 21st century what Jules Verne was to the 19th century.

The Year of the Flood and Oryx and Crake take place in the not-too distant future; in the years 2015 through 2025. Gene splicing and biotechnology have become the most profitable games in town and the developed world has sorted itself into two radically unequal economic tiers.

The top tier consists of hermetically sealed corporate compounds that protect the brilliant scientists who bioengineer new life forms and genetically-based medical treatments. These bioengineered medical products enrich a few multinational corporations at the expense of society as a whole. These corporations now replace nations as the dominant political forces on the planet.

The bottom tier of society is comprised of the ultra-violent, incredibly filthy ‘plebelands’, where everyone else on earth tries to survive by any means possible. Sexual exploitation, gangs, and outright slavery are commonplace. Bodies are thrown into vacant lots and recycled in ‘garboilers’—hellish machines that render any organic material into usable oil by means of extreme heat.

The privileged few who live inside the corporate compounds are well educated and carefully insulated from the grinding suffering in the outside world (except when they tap it to satisfy perverse sexual interests). These corporate compounds are like gated communities with airlocks and every possible amenity trapped inside.

By contrast, life in the plebelands is brutish and short and not unlike life in the wrong part of any major U.S. city today. A brutal private police force called the CorpSeCorps (for Corporate Security Corporation) keeps these two tiers separate at all costs. The CorpSeCorps is a sort of a cross between the CIA and Blackwater, only much nastier and much more omnipresent. Imagining a world police force such as this is not difficult, and far removed from what actually exists already in real life.

In fact, what makes The Year of the Flood and Oryx and Crake so terrifying is not the imaginative scientific detail, though that part is impressive. What makes the novels terrifying is how familiar it all is. The setting and the characters are futuristic but not by much: The most horrifying elements of 2025 are already present and recognizable right here, right now.

Much of the gene splicing and biotechnology described in the novels is already taking place today. Atwood gives these trends only a small push in a direction they are already clearly headed.

Human organs (for transplant) are grown in multiples inside huge pig/human hybrids called pigoons. Wolf/dog hybrids called wolfogs wag their tails in a friendly fashion and then tear people to shreds. (The wolfogs are sold as security animals, for use in perimeters and moats and so forth.)

Cosmetic procedures that grow new skin on the faces of old women are sold in spas with names like Anoo Yoo, while drugs that cure diseases are laced with germs that cause new diseases so as to create a demand for new drugs. Weird looking sheep with blue, pink, or green hair create transplantable wigs for human women.

In the plebelands, a fast food chain called Secret Burgers sells sandwiches made of ground meat with origins are openly questionable (fingernails are not an unusual find), and sex is sold in legal private clubs that are corporately owned and operated and have names like Scales and Tails and SeksMart.

Virulent plagues constantly break out in global hot pockets; a result of the ongoing manufacture of biological weaponry and the unintended consequences of gene-splicing experiments. These outbreaks are dealt with brutally and swiftly by the CorpsSeCorps, who quickly quarantine and exterminate the victims to prevent contagion.

The specter of a final global plague hangs over the corporate compounds and the plebelands at all times. This global genetically spliced plague is considered so inevitable that cult-like religious groups have grown up around the certainty of its eventual occurrence.

The “flood” in the The Year of the Flood is comparable to the flood God sent in the time of Noah, but this time it is a waterless flood—an inevitable and uncontainable plague that will eventually lead to the complete extermination of the human race.

After reading these two novels (Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood), I can now barely get through a day without relating what I see around me to the dystopian trends and institutions in Atwood’s fantasy.

That’s how believable the novels are.

Atwood has fast-forwarded what is actually going on today only a little bit, and the exercise is so credible and so expertly executed that it sticks with you whether you want it to or not.

So do read the books.

I won’t go into the details any more than this because that would be a spoiler. I will tell you that Atwood uses her gift for storytelling from multiple perspectives in these books, and she doesn’t do it in an arty or annoying way, but in a way that rivets your attention to the story.

I literally could not put the books down until I finished them.