Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation. Boots! Where would we be without boos? Where would we be without good? No to bird. It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today it's my great pleasure to be talking to Margaret Atwood, who's come to Los Angeles

to receive the Innovators Award at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival.

Now, I immediately raised my eyes and said, well, what's an innovator?

Margaret Atwood seems to be one of the pursuers of very high-level narrative, narrative, character,

all the things we go to novels for.

And so I suppose this award means that Margaret Atwood has been willing, well, for the last

five years at least, to

tweet and Twitter and publish in serial form on the web. Tell me about this innovation. Do you

have much feel for it, Margaret? Oh, well, there's various kinds of innovation. So the kind that

you just talked about is a product of a new toy box.

And whenever there's a new toy box in any area of life, including biological evolution,

people will jump in and play with the toys.

And out of that playing with the toys come new arrangements of the toys and indeed new toys.

So right now there's a lot of invention going on on the Internet.

You could say we're in the Burgess Shales period of the Internet.

Burgess Shales, as you know, is extremely fertile biological period,

which produced these fossils known as the Burgess Shales,

which have creatures in them who have had no descendants.

So 11 eyes, 13 and a half legs, things we just don't see, because they didn't, in fact, survive.

Our basic body plan has got two arms and two legs, and that's been around for a while.

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