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Few novelists are more respected in the tech world than Margaret Atwood, the English language’s most celebrated literary sci-fi writer. So imagine the reaction last month at the Tools of Change Conference in New York, a 3-day orgy of sessions on distributing e-books, creating iPad apps, and “Planning for Tomorrow’s Digital Landscape,” when Atwood savaged the hype. Maybe it should have been expected, given how much of her work tends towards the dystopian. “The stupid side of electronic information includes: One big solar flare and it’s gone,” she said. Yet some of her best attacks were as much visual as literary: Hand-drawn PowerPoint slides of a dead moose, a blood-covered knife, and a rampaging bear.
