Nanoculture: Implications of the New Technoscience (review)
space's deceptions, the way the density of experience—remembered and forgotten, factual and fictional, the past invading the future— constantly takes us elsewhere. Hence the ease with which her writing moves into mythic or dystopian forms or its capacity to suddenly make things stop and gather into a moment of eerie stasis when the bottom seems to drop out of the structures we erect to contain us. The pace or tempo of her sentences, controlled with often electric precision, links individual experience to spatio-temporal structures at other, deeper levels, fractionally shifting the sense of what it means to be human. Fiona Tolan begins her book by arguing for the "symbiotic relationship" between Atwood as novelist and as theorist (4). In the final analysis, however, whatever theories we use to examine such moments as these are bound to be inadequate, to leave the impact of the writing out of the picture.