Utopias aren’t really Margaret Atwood’s thing. “They’re very 19th-century,” she says. She prefers a slightly gloomier outlook for her bestselling novels, including the feminist dystopia of A Handmaid’s Tale, and the global pandemic that marks her latest novel, The Year of the Flood. There’s another reason, too. Atwood feels strongly that being outdoors is better for children’s health. They benefit from playing outside, she says, and when they don’t, they can suffer from “NDD”: nature deficit disorder. … As the evening progressed this started to make sense. Atwood might be a master of science fiction, but she clearly also knows an awful lot about real science, too.