I know that Margaret Atwood has an unsavory reputation in a lot of genre circles, but that hasn’t stopped me from reading her 2000 novel The Blind Assassin several times since the first time I read it in high school. And I rarely reread novels. Along with One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Blind Assassin is easily one of my favorite books of all time.
The Blind Assassin is a tricky book to pin down. It won the Man Booker Prize and was included on Time Magazine’s list of the 100 greatest English-language novels since 1923. It also contains a science fiction story (of the “talking squids in space variety,” even). The book is not science fiction in and of itself, but you’d have to be pretty determined not to read it, at least in part, as a love letter to the pulp SF novels of the ’30s and ’40s.
