Some of her most perceptive readers have taken this approach. The novelist Francine Prose, reviewing “Alias Grace,” noted that “Atwood has always had much in common with those writers of the last century who were engaged less by the subtle minutiae of human interaction than by the chance to use fiction as a means of exploring and dramatizing ideas.” At its best, Atwood’s fiction summons an intricate social world, whether it be a disquieting vision of the future, as in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” or a vividly rendered past, as in “Alias Grace” or “The Blind Assassin”—a genre-bending tour de force set partly in small-town Canada in the nineteen-twenties, for which Atwood won the Booker Prize, in 2000.

Like her Victorian forebears, Atwood does not shy away from the idea that the novel is a place to explore questions of morality. In an e-mail, she wrote to me, “You can’t use language and avoid moral dimensions, since words are so weighted (lilies that fester vs. weeds, etc.) and all characters have to live somewhere, even if they are rabbits, as in ‘Watership Down,’ and they have to live at some time . . . and they have to make choices.” The challenge, she noted, is avoiding moralism: “How do you ‘engage’ without preaching too much and reducing the characters to mere allegories? A perennial problem. But when the large social issues are very large indeed (‘Doctor Zhivago’), the characters will act within—and be acted upon by—everything that surrounds them.”

At the same time, Atwood’s best fiction is sustained by a specificity of detail—a capacity for noticing—that might be expected from one whose scientist father introduced her to a microscope at a young age. One morning, while we were walking in her neighborhood, Atwood bumped into an old friend, Adrienne Clarkson, a college contemporary who went on to have a distinguished career as a broadcaster, and, for six years, as the governor general of Canada. “We are going to crawl into our eighties together,” Clarkson said, inviting us to her home for tea. The women reminisced about studying with Northrop Frye. “He is the person who talked me into going to grad school instead of moving to Paris, and living in a garret and drinking absinthe,” Atwood said. “But, Adrienne, you did move to Paris.”

“You came to visit,” Clarkson said.

“And you were painting your fingernails a beautiful shade of red,” Atwood continued.

“How frivolous of you to remember that,” Clarkson said, fondly.

“How novelistic of me to remember it,” Atwood said.

Not long ago, a history society at the University of Toronto, which was compiling a video archive of notable alumni, asked to interview Atwood about her college days. On a chilly afternoon in January, she found her way to an upper room in the university’s Gothic Revival student center. Four eager undergraduates, all women, were there to film and quiz her. Atwood sat by a leaded-glass window against a gray sky, and amiably answered questions about what it was like being a young woman on campus in the fifties. “Whatever things are like when you are young, they seem normal, because you have nothing to compare them to,” she said. “For instance, I would not ever have worn jeans to high school. It would not have been permitted except on football days. They wanted us to wear jeans on football day, so we could sit on the hill and not have anyone looking up our skirts. It takes a while to figure this out, but now I realize that must have been the reason.”

In those days, Atwood said, there was no fear of rape on campus, as there seemed to be today. “I am not saying that it didn’t happen, but you would never hear of it,” she said. “And I would suspect that the chances of that happening were quite low, because what everybody was afraid of then was getting pregnant. The boys were afraid of getting pregnant, too, because you could end up married at an early age that way, and people didn’t particularly want that. But there was no Pill.”

One young interviewer, wide-eyed, said, “It is very interesting to consider the importance of the Pill, not just for women but in changing society. I hadn’t really considered it.”

Atwood continued talking about changing mores—the supplanting of the panty girdle by nylon tights, and the consequent innovation of the miniskirt. But when one of the students fumbled with the camera, in an effort to renew its memory card, Atwood took the opportunity to turn the tables.

“I was astonished to see that the Polaroid camera has come back—why? What do you do with a Polaroid picture?” she asked.

The students, delighted, offered a chorus of explanations: such images combined the instant gratification of the selfie with the pleasure of a physical object that could be pinned on a wall. Atwood went on to seek their views on other surprisingly resurgent technologies—vinyl records, even cassette players—and then shifted to something more up-to-date. “Do you know an exercise app called Zombies, Run?” she asked.

“Is that, like, where you go for a run and zombies chase you?” one student asked. Yes, Atwood said: the app, a kind of interactive podcast, plays an apocalyptic story line in a listener’s ears as she jogs, thus making a workout more entertaining, if you like that sort of thing. “I’m in one of the episodes,” Atwood announced. She has a cameo as herself: her voice is supposedly being transmitted over a crackling phone line from Toronto.

Finally, the students’ camera was working. Atwood faced it again, and said, brightly, “So, let’s see. What else do you want to know?”

Her openness to younger people is, in part, a consequence of the passage of time: there are many more younger people around than older ones, so she’d better be open to them, if she’s going to be open to anybody. But it is also temperamental. Zombies, Run! was co-created by Naomi Alderman, a British novelist in her early forties, who is also a video-game designer. She and Atwood became friends after Atwood chose to be her mentor, through a program sponsored by Rolex. “She was intrigued that I might know about something she doesn’t know about yet, and I might be able to tell her about it,” Alderman said. “I don’t think she judges anything in advance as being beneath her, or beyond her, or outside her realm of interest.” Alderman has accompanied Atwood and Gibson on several bird-watching vacations, including one earlier this year in the rain forests of Panama. “We stayed in tents,” Alderman told me. “And the first night I was going back to my tent and my headlamp caught these blue shining glints on the jungle floor, and every single one of these glints was a pair of spider’s eyes staring at me. When I told Margaret, she was very disappointed—she really wanted to see the spiders.”

Atwood’s embrace of technological innovation is sometimes more theoretical than practical: she has yet to master streaming video, so she still watches DVDs. Occasionally, her fascination with technological processes, combined with an incomprehension of them, can have productive results. A dozen or so years ago, when videoconferencing technology was still a novelty, Atwood wondered whether it might be possible to develop a means of conducting book signings remotely. “I thought of the writing flying through the air, and materializing somewhere else,” she said. Her flight of fancy, combined with some technical and marketing know-how assembled by Matthew Gibson, her stepson, resulted in the LongPen, a robotic device that enables a writer—or anyone—to sign a paper remotely in a manner that replicates the speed and pressure of the original autograph, and is indistinguishable from it. (Gibson has since created an e-signature company, Syngrafii, and it sells the LongPen, which is marketed less to weary authors than to financial and legal companies.)

Atwood was an early adopter of Twitter, signing up in 2009; she now has about a million and a half followers, though she is aware that some of that number must be bots. “I do sometimes get ‘I miss your dick’—they don’t read the fine print,” she said. She appreciates followers who have a specialized interest in the sciences; they help her keep abreast of recent developments that might be of interest for a future writing project, or resonate with a past one. She engages, often cheerily, with her followers and others, sometimes on topics that another writer might avoid. “Only ‘race’ is the human race, sez me. (And says science.),” she wrote in response to one user’s speculation that she was Jewish. “But no, I wouldn’t have ended up in a Hitler death camp for that reason.”