Memory, Representation, and Adaptation in the Age of Climate Crisis: Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy

Environmental harm is frequently time-stretched, invisibly distributed, and so culturally unseen until retold, as demonstrated by Rob Nixon's seminal idea of slow violence and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s view concerning the intersection of human history and planetary processes. In a similar vein, Ursula Heise has maintained that the concepts of extinction and biodiversity loss are culturally embedded narratives that shape how species and ecologies are remembered rather than being just scientific categories. This study examines the cultural aspects of nature crises, emphasizing how lived experiences of climate disruption are mediated by cultural frameworks. It focuses on how cultural narratives, practices, and traditions depict, recall, and respond to change. Through sustained close readings of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy—Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam—this article examines the entanglements of memory, representation, and cultural adaptation under the conditions of the contemporary climate crisis. Atwood’s speculative fiction foregrounds storytelling as a critical site of environmental ethics, drawing on and contributing to debates in the humanities, memory studies, posthumanist theory, and cultural studies.