In Other Worlds by Margaret Atwood

Previously published in Dawn Books & Authors. 

Let me make it clear that I am an ardent fan of Margaret Atwood. I’m bound by years of unequivocal love and fealty to feel strongly for everything she writes – I can’t think of a novel of hers that I have not enjoyed reading and thinking about. But because my own personal tastes do lean towards speculative fiction, I do have a special liking for four particular works by Atwood: The Handmaids Tale (1985), The Blind Assassin (2000) Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Year of the Flood (2009). Of course, it does not bother me in the least that many writers, readers and critics would categorise three of these novels as Science Fiction – it probably wouldn’t bother many of Atwood’s fans. Oddly, it does seem to bother Atwood herself, who claims instead, that speculative fiction and SF are two entirely different worlds of writing and that her novels are very clearly only speculative. In an essay called Moving Targets, published in 2005 as part of the collection Writing with Intent, Atwood clarifies that the worlds she creates in her novels are ones that could be possible – that may even currently exist in ways. SF, explains Atwood, is about things that ‘are not possible today’. While her readers may have accepted this as just another Atwoodian quirk, there was one person who refused to accept Atwood’s definitions without debate.

The grand doyenne of SF and fantasy Ursula Le Guin was decidedly unhappy with Atwood’s differentiation between speculative fiction and SF and she voiced her opinions in the course of her review of The Year of the Flood for The Guardian. Le Guin began her review by quoting Atwood’s differentiations, saying ‘this arbitrarily restrictive definition seems designed to protect [Atwood’s] novels from being relegated to a genre still shunned by hidebound readers, reviewers and prize-awarders. She doesn’t want the literary bigots to shove her into the literary ghetto’. Le Guin went on to explain that she was unable then, to review The Year of the Flood freely without using ‘the lively vocabulary of modern science-fiction criticism, giving it the praise it deserves as a work of unusual cautionary imagination and satirical invention.’ From this, it becomes clear that Le Guin enjoyed the book itself – just not Atwood’s refusal to allow her work to be called SF. It may seem silly to those who are not familiar with either Atwood or Le Guin, but there was just no way that Atwood would let this rest. Atwood is nothing if not stealthy and imaginative. She bided her time until 2011, when she published In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, a collection of work examining what she believed to be SF and fantasy. The book is in three parts: the first is an account of Atwood’s own involvement with SF; the second is a collection of her various articles about specific works of SF and the third is a set of Atwood’s ‘mini-SF pieces’. The book is essentially a close look at Atwood’s own very personal entanglement with SF and fantasy – as a reader, as a reviewer and as a writer. And in a masterful stroke of classic Atwoodian sneaky, cheeky humour and sting, the entire book is dedicated to Ursula Le Guin.

Now this is hilarious to both fans of Atwood and of Le Guin  - and to many readers who are simply fans of the genre, but the basic question that arises with In Other Worlds is: what, exactly, is Atwood’s point? She remains staunch in her opinion that her work is not SF - it does not involve alien invaders from space, for instance, or humans traveling in spaceships to distant planets, nor does it feature dragons, swords or magic. Because these are, essentially, what her definitions for SF and fantasy are. And so by dint of her own definitions, Atwood is not a SF writer. She explains in detail the differences between various kinds of SF and fantasy, explains at length how her own interest developed from childhood and it is clear from her many in depth reviews and examinations of classic SF that she is, in fact, quite an aficionado of the genre – a ‘fan girl’, even. So is this book then the justification of a serious ‘literary’ writer who has occasionally veered into a genre often regarded as low brow?

Atwood states clearly in In Other Worlds that genres are now often grey areas but she seems to be certain that her own novels are not SF. This is interesting because she previously accepted the highly prestigious SF prize the Arthur C. Clarke award for The Handmaids Tale, which was also nominated for a further two SF awards: the Nebula and the Prometheus. Did her understanding of how she categorized her own novels change in more recent years? Or has she felt the need to justify her divisions of genre after Le Guin’s barbed review? Regardless, In Other Worlds makes for fairly interesting reading – albeit with certain pieces that are converted from lectures previously given and so are obviously more stilted than the others. She writes, ‘it’s too bad that one term – SF – has served for so many variants, and too bad also that this term has acquired a dubious if not downright sluttish reputation’, and her own enthusiasm for the genre is so huge and so deep that very often it is impossible not to get caught up in her infectious interest. She writes just as easily of her own early superhero creations of flying rabbits as she does of the importance of Piercy’s feminist speculative fiction classic Woman on the Edge of Time, or Haggard’s She – there’s even a look at some of Le Guin’s own work. Particularly interesting are her essays on Huxley’s seminal dystopia Brave New World, and Ishiguro’s highly contemporary take on ‘evolved’ society in Never Let Me Go. There is never a moment when Atwood fails to shine as an incredibly well read and intelligent reader of SF – both high and low brow. Her tone is always humorous, her opinions often carry a sting in the tail, particularly when she sounds off on something she herself has staunch ideas about: ‘The scientific version of our existence on this planet may very well be physically true, but we don’t like it much. It isn’t cuddly. There aren’t many tunes you can hum in the shower’. For those who are familiar with the works she examines, In Other Worlds will prove to be an interesting perspective, but for those who are not, it may well seem like an endless list of suggested SF reading. Of course, Atwoodian quirks wink around every corner, with her own hand drawn illustrations of SF tropes inside the book jacket, to a hilarious but catty letter written to a school district where The Handmaids Tale was once banned.

There remains a certain amount of unnecessary detailed justification of Atwood’s own work in In Other Worlds however, and this is what is most problematic and contradictory about the book. For instance, Atwood claims that her novels, Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood are not really post-apocalyptic as ‘in a true apocalypse everything on Earth is destroyed, whereas in these two books the only element that’s annihilated is the human race, or most of it.’ This leads to the question of what then is post apocalyptic fiction and is there such a thing? There are no books set in a world that is entirely annihilated – as per Atwood’s definition of a true post apocalyptic setting there would be no life left to tell stories about. Even in books about mass death brought on by climate change, as in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, there are always survivors – they are the ones whose stories we read. What then, is truly post apocalyptic? When everything and everyone is annihilated; a return to complete utter blackness, as at the end of Asgard? As much of a fan as I am of dystopia and speculative fiction, I can not think of a single book that can fit perfectly into Atwood’s definition simply because black nothingness will never have a story to tell.

‘All myths are stories, but not all stories are myths: among stories, myths hold a special place’, writes Atwood but sadly her own stories in the last section of this book are not going to hold any special place – they are unfortunately, rather ubiquitous and just not very good – almost as if she wants to prove one very last time that she really, truly does not and can not write real SF. Again, oddly enough, the best in the lot is an extract from her Booker Award winning 2000 novel, The Blind Assassin. It is a strange bittersweet story called The Peach Women of Aa’a, which will remind readers suddenly that when it comes to fiction narratives, Atwood will always be a force to contend with – even for the likes of Ursula Le Guin.

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EXTRACT:

“Science Fiction” is the box in which [Le Guin]’s work is usually placed, but it’s an awkward box: it bulges with discards from else-where. Into it have been crammed all those stories that don’t fit comfortably into the family room of the socially realistic novel or mentalized genres: westerns, gothics, horrors, gothic romances, and the novels or war, crime, and spies. Its subdivisions include science fiction proper (gizmo-riddled and theory based space travel, time travel, or cybertravel to other worlds, with aliens frequent); science fiction fantasy (dragons are common; the gizmos are less plausible, and may include wands); and speculative fiction (human society and its possible future forms, which are neither much better than what we have now or much worse). However, the membranes separating these subdivisions are permeable, and osmotic flow from one to another is the norm.