Margaret Atwood is an internationally celebrated Canadian writer who has risen to rock-star status after her 30-year-old book, The Handmaid’s Tale became a worldwide phenomenon as a streaming web series. The launch of The Testaments, her sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, was streamed to more than a thousand theatres around the world and the 79-year-old author set off on a grueling global tour. In this exclusive Green Interview, Atwood speaks with Silver Donald Cameron about some of what’s involved in creating dystopian novels, set in a world after the environmental collapse. In the totalitarian society of The Handmaid’s Tale, for instance, the world has become so toxic that only a handful of women are still fertile, so childbearing is the only role that her protagonist Offred is allowed to play. People who run afoul of the authorities are sent to “the colonies,” areas so toxic that people die there in two or three years. What’s it like to inhabit such a world even in your imagination? Does the experience leave the author hopeless or hopeful?