In Other Worlds—SF and the Human Imagination (review)

In Other Worlds is not a scholarly study or literary history of science fiction but, rather, a series of interventions by Margaret Atwood into a genre some of her work stands in ambivalent relation to. It is composed of two, dialectical parts. The first, "In Other Worlds—SF and the Human Imagination," presents three "Ellman Lectures" that Atwood gave at Emory University in fall 2010 on the interconnected topics of genre, fantasy, science fiction, storytelling, and the imagination: "Flying Rabbits: Denizens of Distant Spaces," "Burning Bushes: Why Heaven and Hell Went to Planet X," and "Dire Cartographies: The Roads to Ustopia." The second, which includes two sections, "Other Deliberations" and "Five Tributes," collects miscellaneous writings on science and speculative fiction, including reviews, introductions, radio talks, and a handful of fictional "mini-SF pieces."

Atwood's opening gambit is a response to a critique from fellow writer Ursula K. Le Guin, who in a Guardian review of Atwood's 2009 novel The Year of the Flood takes umbrage at her constant attempts to distance herself from the "science fiction" tag. "Margaret Atwood doesn't want any of her books to be called science fiction," writes Le Guin, describing Atwood as seeking to "protect her 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." Atwood responds in two ways: first, by settling upon a let's-agree-to-disagree position concerning genre definitions ("What Le Guin means by 'science fiction' is what I mean by 'speculative fiction'"); second, by admitting her preference for the latter—"Is Nineteen Eighty-Four as much 'science fiction' as The Martian Chronicles, I might reply? I would answer not, and therein lies the distinction." If Atwood fails to convincingly counter the charge that she doesn't hold a particularly high opinion of science fiction, this is because she doesn't, repeatedly referring to the genre's golden age incarnation as a schlocky catalog of bug-eyed monsters and busty damsels in distress: "It's too bad that one term—science fiction—has served for so many variants, and too bad that this term has acquired a dubious if not downright sluttish reputation. . . . In brilliant hands, however, the form can be brilliant." Good SF is the exception, for Atwood: Most of it, the stuff about robots, spaceships, and aliens, is immature trash for boys. Atwood has many eloquent and erudite things to say about Romantic and Victorian British literature, the utopian/dystopian tradition, and scifi's literary antecedents and high points (Shelley, Wells, Huxley): the rational world of "speculative fiction," where, as she describes the rules she set herself for The Handmaid's Tale, she would not put "anything that humankind had not already done, somewhere, sometime, or for which it did not have the tools."

Atwood's gaze is thus trained on authors and genres influential toward, yet not always central to, SF: the utopian tradition of Thomas More, the fantastical satires of Jonathan Swift, the grim and satirical dystopias of Orwell and Huxley, and the feminist science fiction explorations of Marge Piercy and Le Guin (to whom this book is dedicated, as well as an essay, "The Queen of Quinkdom"). The three Ellman lectures offer, in somewhat broad strokes, a series of meditations on the social function of storytelling and myth, intertwined with memoir snatches of Atwood's own literary coming-of-age and interest in the fantastical. Her childhood basement excursions into the flickering worlds of H. Rider Haggard and Swift, and her days as a grad student at Harvard studying nineteenth-century fantastical literature, mingle colloquially with such insights as how SF has now usurped the place once occupied by the theological: Our existential fantasies and fears and their embodiments have now migrated into outer space. Atwood's comparative approach moves effortlessly across historical (and prehistorical) periods, genres...