Includes bibliographical references (pages 452-457) and index.

Part I: 2004-2009. What will happen next?. Scientific romancing ; Frozen in time ; From eve to dawn ; Polonia ; Somebody's daughter ; Five visits to the word-hoard ; The echo maker ; Wetlands ; Trees of life, trees of death ; Ryszard Kapuściński ; Anne of Green Gables ; Alice Munro: an appreciation ; Ancient balances ; Scrooge ; A writing life -- Part II: 2010-2013. Art is our nature. The writer as political agent? Really? ; Literature and the environment ; Alice Munro ; The gift ; Bring up the bodies ; Rachel Carson anniversary ; The futures market ; Why I wrote Maddaddam ; Seven gothic tales ; Doctor sleep ; Doris Lessing ; How to change the world? -- Part III: 2014-2016. Which is to be master. In translationland ; On beauty ; The summer of the stromatolites ; Kafka ; Future library ; Reflections on The handmaid's tale ; We are double-plus unfree ; Buttons or bows? ; Gabrielle Roy ; Shakespeare and me ; Marie-Claire blais ; Kiss of the fur queen ; We hang by a thread -- Part IV: 2017-2019. How slippery is the slope?. What art under Trump? ; The illustrated man ; Am I a bad feminist? ; We lost Ursula Le Guin when we needed her most ; Three tarot cards ; A slave state? ; Oryx and crake ; Greetings, earthlings! What are these human rights of which you speak? ; Payback ; Memory of fire ; Tell, the, truth -- Part V: 2020-2021. Thought and memory. Growing up in quarantineland ; The equivalents ; Inseparable ; We ; The writing of The testaments ; The bedside book of birds ; Perpetual motion and gentleman death ; Caught in time's current ; Big science ; Barry Lopez ; The sea trilogy.