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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how Atwood’s The Year of the Flood links nature, technology, and religion. Through the hymns and sermons of the God’s Gardeners, the novel reveals how ecological narratives can both resist and mirror technocratic control, shaping our collective visions of nature amid crisis.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009) weaves together nature, technology, and religion through narrative form. Atwood’s concept of “ustopia” captures the novel’s blurred line between utopia and dystopia: a corporate technocracy devoted to genetic engineering coexists with the God’s Gardeners, an eco-religious sect preparing for an apocalyptic “Waterless Flood.” Through sermons and hymns drawn from the God’s Gardeners Oral Hymnbook, Atwood constructs a symbolic world in which vegetal metaphors and ritual language seek to reimagine humanity’s relationship with the natural world.

While the Gardeners seem to embody ecological resistance, they mirror the technocracy in their desire to transcend the “flaws” of human design and to impose unity on a reified vision of nature. Their hymns and sermons celebrate harmony and belonging, yet they also suppress dissent and critical reflection. Drawing on Lluís Duch’s sociophenomenological approach to religion and Mark C. Taylor’s definition of religion as an adaptive network of myths and rituals, I argue that Atwood exposes how spiritual narratives can function both as poetic creation and as tools of control.

By interlacing sacred song with satire, The Year of the Flood complicates oppositions between nature and culture, or religion and technology. Atwood’s ustopian vision shows how narrative itself—through storytelling, prophecy, and hymn—mediates between ecological imaginaries and the pathologies of late capitalism, inviting readers to reflect on how the stories we tell about “nature” shape collective futures in times of crisis.