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In Other Worlds—SF and the Human Imagination

2012; Penn State University Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/utopianstudies.23.1.0290

2154-9648

Daniel Lukes,

Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

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 sci-fi'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, authors, and motifs, and it is her eye for detail, as well as her mordant and witty jabs at the contemporary right-wing, right-crushing U.S. corporate-political complex, that saves these three lecture-essays from generality. Her theory that all utopias dialectically contain within them the germ of dystopia, and vice versa (Atwood coins the term ustopia), and her thoughts on the socio-ethical functions of the utopian/dystopian form itself remain, however, somewhat undeveloped.The targeted essays and reviews that make up the second half are where In Other Worlds stops shuffling its feet and begins to take flight. Atwood's pieces on Piercy, Rider Haggard, McKibben, and Orwell are of particular interest to readers of her three dystopias to date: The Handmaid's Tale (1985), Oryx and Crake (2003), and The Year of the Flood (Atwood is currently working on a third Crakeworld “simultaneouel”). Her review of Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) is a trenchant reminder of Piercy's gripping portrayal of downtrodden racialized femininity, in the story of Latina woman Connie Ramos, poised between being abusively institutionalized in a mental asylum and her otherworldly visits to the utopia of Mattapoisett, in the company of the androgynous Luciente. Her essay on H. Rider Haggard's She compellingly envisions the femme fatale as a panicked male literary response to the emancipation of women and the nascent feminist movement of the late nineteenth century. “George Orwell: Some Personal Connections” complements “Dire Cartographies” to expand upon the influence of Nineteen Eighty-Four on The Handmaid's Tale, which is often compared with it: Here Atwood praises Orwell's linguistic clarity, nonconformist ethics, and glum hopefulness. Engaging with such topics as gene-splicing, posthumanism, cybernetics, and nanotechnology, “Arguing Against Ice Cream,” a review of Bill McKibben's Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003), concurs with McKibben's plea against market-driven technoscientific models of human perfectionism: the utopian desires for bodily optimization and immortality much-mocked lately by Slavoj Žižek.1 These desires, if implemented, warns Atwood, will provoke a two-tier society of the “GenRich” and the “GenPoor,” the latter sooner or later bound to “get hold of some pitchforks and torches and storm the barricades. To avoid the peasants, we'll have to go into outer space. Having fun yet?”The handful of “miniatures” in the “Five Tributes” section provide a provoking coda, especially “Coldblooded” and “Homelanding”: two vignettes that skillfully employ classic SF defamiliarization to rethink the human (“On the top of my head, but not on the front, there is an odd growth, like a species of seaweed. Some think this is a kind of fur, others consider it modified feathers, evolved perhaps from the scales like those of lizards”). “The Peach Women of Aa'A from The Blind Assassin” is a knowing parody of the kind of chauvinist SF that feminist science fiction so ably critiques. Yet, while witty and diverting, this fragment calls attention to what In Other Worlds so clearly lacks: a direct and involved engagement with the genre that Atwood to many spearheads—feminist science fiction. Not just Le Guin and Piercy but also Octavia E. Butler (a quote from whom opens In Other Worlds), Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr., Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, Anne McCaffrey, and many more are absent from this book. Atwood's essays here on Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005) and Bryher's 1965 novel Visa for Avalon (from the sounds of it a treasure worth rediscovering) ably showcase her interest in the dystopian. But her unjustified standoffishness with regards to SF and the wealth of captivating writing being done today on topics she herself embraces (biopolitics, reproduction, technoscience, eco-apocalypse, neomedievalism), across and blurring the distinction between genre and literary fiction, from Paolo Bacigalupi and Maurice Dantec to Will Self and Michel Houellebecq, arguably truncates this study's scope.The result is that Atwood overlooks the extent of the shift currently occurring within mainstream fiction: from the once-solid grounds of realism and onto the shimmering shores of fantasy, the speculative, comic book, and dystopian. This includes higher-brow fare by the likes of Cormac McCarthy, Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz, and Jonathan Lethem; newer names such as Colson Whitehead, Gary Shteyngart, Ian McDonald, Kameron Hurley, and China Miéville; and young adult hits such as Twilight, Hunger Games, and Uglies.2 This is a movement Atwood has been and continues to be a major part of: one into a world where SF represents not the geeky escapology of “bug-eyed monsters,” “tentacled, blood-sucking Martians,” or “things that could not possibly happen” but, rather, the collective, imaginative response to a world that has itself been “science-fictionalized”—a place where talking robots, genetic manipulation, ecological meltdown, assassin drones, remote control wars, and worldwide viral cyberstructures are not mere fantasies but global facts of daily life. In Other Worlds looks clearly and elegantly back into dystopia's literary pasts, but unfortunately not always as thrillingly into either its presents or its futures, as the dystopian fiction that has made and continues to make Margaret Atwood a major contemporary literary force, between this world and others.