In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination by Margaret Atwood: review

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In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination by Margaret Atwood: review
October 19, 2011
By Paul Kincaid
The Telegraph

Margaret Atwood won the inaugural Arthur C Clarke Award for The Handmaid’s Tale, a work that is now a staple on most university science fiction courses. She has continued to use sci-fi tropes in such novels as The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. She is clearly comfortable with the genre. And yet, she is uncomfortable at being identified with science fiction.

This discomfort is exemplified by a notorious remark about “squids in space” in a piece for The New York Review of Books that is curiously absent from this collection. It is also evident in a dispute with Ursula K Le Guin to which Atwood refers in her introduction; indeed, this whole book, which brings together a variety of lectures, reviews and short stories that engage with science fiction, might be considered as a response to Le Guin, to whom it is dedicated.

In a review, Le Guin accused Atwood of defining sci-fi so narrowly as to “protect her novels from being relegated to a genre still shunned by hidebound readers, reviewers and prize-awarders”. Atwood seems to think that this argument comes down to a minor difference of terminology, throwing around terms like “science fiction”, “speculative fiction” and “fantasy” as though they all mean roughly the same, while missing what lay under the surface of Le Guin’s comment.

But then, Atwood does concentrate a lot on surfaces (in one review, her most telling point is that the author uses linoleum at a time when shag pile carpets would have been more common).

The book opens with three lectures that trace her personal involvement with science fiction, starting with superhero comics and ending with her own utopian and dystopian writing.

The first lecture devotes most of its length to the clothes that superheroes wear. The last piece in the book is a surprisingly spirited defence of the covers of Weird Tales magazine in the Thirties, which were notable for portraying women in exaggerated breastplates and little else.

In between, she keeps returning to the topic of clothes as if that is the most telling aspect of science fiction. At times, as in that first lecture, the topic can be revealing, but too often there is a sense that by looking too closely at costume, she is missing everything that is going on below the surface.

If In Other Worlds stands as a study in ambivalence, the source may lie in Atwood’s own education. During her time at the University of Toronto, Northrop Frye ruled the roost, and clearly had a lasting effect upon her. She cites him frequently, using his ideas of mythic archetypes to draw a direct line of descent from myth to modern science fiction, though most contemporary critics would repudiate this rather simplistic interpretation of both Frye and science fiction.

Frye divided fiction into four genres: novel, romance, confession and Menippean Satire, and Atwood specifically describes sci-fi as a romance. Frye more readily identified sci-fi as Menippean Satire, but Atwood seems uneasy at the satirical aspects of science fiction, except in her own work.

Since she clearly regards her own fiction as belonging to the novel, a very different creature, there is an incentive to draw a dividing line between the science fiction she supports and the fiction she writes.

It is this underlying need for a distinction that perhaps explains why the best pieces in the book are about authors who are, like her, not science fiction writers. Thus, there are good perspectives on George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and excellent pieces on the mad scientists in book three of Dean Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, on the rather weird novel Visa for Avalon by the imagist writer Bryher, and on Bill McKibben’s non-fiction work, Enough.

Yet a review of Le Guin’s The Birthday of the World seems to miss out most of what is in the book, and an essay on “Ten Ways of Looking at The Island of Dr Moreau”, which is actually one way broken into 10 parts, barely disturbs the surface of Wells’s complex and challenging book.

As if she didn’t quite have enough non-fiction to fill out the book, Atwood includes an extract from The Blind Assassin and four very short pieces of fiction, all of which turn on a conventional reversal of our perspective.

On this evidence, Atwood can take comfort from the fact that she is not a science fiction writer. The problem is that this is a book that means well towards sci-fi; Atwood wants to take it seriously, and wants her readers to take it seriously, yet she can never quite conquer her own ambivalence towards the genre.

In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination

By Margaret Atwood

Virago, £17.99, 255pp