``God gave unto the Animals / A wisdom past our power to see,'' goes a hymn sung by God's Gardeners, the ecologically minded, deeply spiritual but eminently practical religious cult in Margaret Atwood's fire-breathing new novel, The Year of the Flood.

The Gardeners are opposed to eating meat unless, of course, civilization collapses. In that case, well, you'd better catch, kill and carve something up, roast it over the fire and give thanks for its sacrifice. The Gardeners even teach you how. Now please turn to page 236 in your hymnals, and sing along.

``Each knows innately how to live / Which we must learn laboriously.'' Amen.

Author of more than 40 works of poetry, fiction and nonfiction, Atwood, who appears at Miami Book Fair International at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, can attest to the labors of learning a new world order, specifically a new and fairly exhausting technique of promoting a book.

The hullaballoo arises from the topical content of The Year of the Flood (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $26.95), a terrifying dystopian work about the days before and after the ``waterless flood,'' a biological plague that wipes out most of humankind.

TOPSY-TURVY WORLD

The pandemic -- the virus makes H1N1 look like the common cold -- is only one of the book's uncomfortably too-close-to-home elements. Government and commerce have melded. Firearms are illegal (``I'm no friend of the N.R.A.,'' Atwood says, ``but the idea of only the government having guns. . . . Well, we know how that goes''). The gap between the wealthy and the poor is massive. Millions of species are extinct, and genetic engineering has crossed unimaginable boundaries. Stop me if any of this sounds familiar.

Atwood's Miami appearance will involve a fairly straightforward reading, though she may reprise the mole hymn she sang recently on The Diane Rehm Show. But around 20 of the 35 stops on her tour have involved choirs, live performances, fundraising and dinners, many of a vegetarian nature. For the tour at least, Atwood has given up meat.

And then there's yearoftheflood.com, where you can download ring tones of your favorite Gardener hymn (we recommend The Water Shrew That Rends Its Prey). And the tweeting. ``Oh, God, am I tweeting?'' says the prize-winning Canadian author, who admits she also has spent a lot of time seeking ecologically sustainable, shade-grown organic coffee on her iPhone. With her partner Graeme Gibson, Atwood is honorary president of BirdLife International's Rare Bird Club, one of the groups involved in the tour-related fundraising.

Flood's environmental aspects have galvanized much of the fuss, but the novel also acts as a provocative companion to Atwood's 2003 novel Oryx and Crake. The books share characters, notably the Gardeners, who diligently prepare for the oncoming apocalypse, and Jimmy, who dwells in the sheltered Compound, which protects the wealthy and members of the fascist, materialistic CorpSeCorps, a threatening police-state presence.

`` `Because of the iPhone' is my way of explaining it,'' Atwood says from her Washington, D.C., hotel when asked why she revisited Oryx and Crake's scorched-earth scenario. ``When you push the map [application] on the iPhone, you get only a little bit of the map. The rest is grid. Then if you want to look elsewhere, to go north or south or east or west, that part of the grid gets colored in. Oryx and Crake only colored in some of the grid, the grid inside the compound because Jimmy is a compound brat. He's kind of scared of being out in Pleebland, where everything is for sale. . . . I thought it would be interesting to go to those parts of society that are in the least-protected areas, slums so slummy even the CorpSeCorps can't get anything out of them except criminal contacts.''

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