I continued to write away at Oryx and Crake during the summer of 2001. We had some other travels planned, and I wrote several chapters of this book on a boat in the Arctic, where I could see for myself how quickly the glaciers were receding. I had the whole book mapped out and had reached the end of Part 7 when I was due to go to New York for the paperback publication of The Blind Assassin.

I was sitting in the Toronto airport, daydreaming about Part 8. In ten minutes my flight would be called. An old friend of mine came over and said, ‘We're not flying.’ ‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘Come and look at the television,’ he replied. It was September 11.