What Le Guin means by “science fiction” is what I mean by “speculative fiction,” and what she means by “fantasy” would include some of what I mean by “science fiction.”
As Atwood notes, “bendiness of terminology, literary gene-swapping and inter-genre visiting has been going on in the SF world . . . for some time.” She quotes the veteran SF writer Bruce Sterling, who coined the term “slipstream” in the influential essay “Slipstream” (1989):
A category . . . [is distinct from a] genre . . . a spectrum of work united by an inner identity, a coherent aesthetic, a set of conceptual guidelines, an ideology if you will. . . . I want to describe what seems to me to be a new, emergent “genre,” which has not yet become a “category.” This genre is not “category” SF; it is not even “genre” SF. Instead, it is a contemporary kind of writing which has set its face against consensus reality. It is fantastic, surreal sometimes, speculative upon occasion, but not rigorously so. . . . Instead, this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel strange; the way that living in the late twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility.
Apart from this scrupulousness about definitions, which may be of relatively less interest to her readers than to Atwood, In Other Worlds is a wonderfully warm, intimate excursion through Atwood’s life as a reader and as a writer. There is much overlap between Atwood’s memoirist recollections in the first section of the book and the remainder of the book, for Atwood is foremost an avid and enthusiastic reader of any and all texts that were available to her in a childhood of social deprivation but intellectual richness that suggests, to a degree, the legendary childhood of the Brontë children in remote Haworth bordering on the English moors:
I grew up largely in the north woods of Canada, where our family spent the springs, summers, and falls. My access to cultural institutions and artifacts was limited: not only were there no electrical appliances, furnaces, flush toilets, schools, or grocery stores, there was no TV, no radio shows. . . . no movies, no theatre, and no libraries. But there were a lot of books. These ranged from scientific textbooks to detective novels, with everything in between. I was never told I couldn’t read any of them, however unsuitable some of them may have been.
Atwood’s reading is, as one might expect, heterogeneous; her earliest efforts at writing are fantasies (“superhero rabbits in Mischiefland”) of a sort common to imaginative children. Looking back at her childhood predilection for comic book superheroes, Atwood notes that, for instance, Captain Marvel “descends to us, in part, through ancient mythology”; Wonder Woman has “links with the goddess Diana the Huntress”, and Batman “is born of technology alone . . . entirely human and therefore touchingly mortal, but he does have a lot of bat-machinery and bat-gizmos to help him in his fight against crime.” Atwood asks: Where do other worlds and alien beings come from? Is the “under-bed monster” an archetype of “pre-history”? Could it be that the tendency to produce “other worlds” is an essential property of the human imagination, “via the limbic system and the neocortex, just as empathy is?”
In an essay titled “Burning Bushes; or, Why Heaven and Hell Went to Planet X,” Atwood argues persuasively that myths have become detached from traditional religion, thus from traditional religious imagery; the mythmaking imagination is now attuned to the “supernatural”—“Planet X.” Atwood’s many questions spring from the analytical-critical-scholarly imagination that once sent her, as a Woodrow Wilson fellow, to Radcliffe for an M.A. degree in English, in 1962, and from there to Harvard, where she enrolled in the English Ph.D. program, dropping out before she completed a dissertation on “The English Metaphysical Romance”:
Do stories free the human imagination or tie it up in chains by prescribing “right behavior,” like so many Victorian Christian-pop novels about the virtues of virtuous women? Are narratives a means to enforce social control or a means of escape from it? Is the use of “story” as a synonym for “lie” justified, and if so, are some lies necessary? Are we the slaves of our own stories—our family narratives and dramas, for instance—which compel us to re-enact them? Do stories optimistically help us shape our lives for the better or pessimistically doom us to tragic failure? Do they embody ancient tropes and act out atavistic rituals?
This essay also traces the influence of Northrop Frye upon Atwood, and her fascination with the viability of “myth” in everyday life, as in classic works of literature: “Thus it was a grave matter to be told as a Canadian—as one constantly was told, in the late 1950s—that one lacked a mythology.”
Atwood is very funny about the “old theologies and old rituals” of the past, but she is very funny about new theologies as well: she sees science as a new-myth system not so very different from the old, though expressed in a new vocabulary:
Science, too, has generated new myth systems. . . . Here, for instance, is a new creation myth: the universe began with a Big Bang. Then the Earth was formed of cosmic dust. What came before the Big Bang? A singularity. What is a singularity? We don’t know.
Here is a new origin-of-people myth: people emerged via something called evolution forces from pre-human life forms that also so emerged. Who created the rules for evolution? Life did. Where did life come from? We’re not sure, but we’re working on it. Why are we on Earth? No particular reason.
Atwood notes that in “proper” novels characters are placed for us securely in social space by being provided, usually, with a family, and a background; such characters experience “inner problems, or conflicts,” in contrast to less realistic, more fabulist works of fiction—by Kafka and Gogol, for instance—in which characters appear virtually out of nowhere, in unrecognizable or radically altered settings. In addition, SF stories can take us where no one has ever gone—in spaceships, or on cyberspace trips that are analogues to ancient quests:
I’m far from the first commentator to note that science fiction is where theologically linked phenomena and reasonable facsimiles of them went after Paradise Lost. The form has often been used as a way of acting out a theological doctrine, as— for instance—Dante’s Divine Comedy was once used. . . . The religious resonances in such films as Star Wars are more than obvious.
Atwood is particularly illuminating in her discussion of utopias, dystopias, and “ustopias”—(an Atwood-invented word made by combining utopia and dystopia). Here, texts including She, James Hilton’s Lost Horizons, H. G. Wells’s “Country of the Blind,” Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Trilogy and J. R. R. Tolkien’s ubiquitous The Lord of the Rings are discussed in terms of “cartographies”—“mappable locations and states of mind.” Atwood reconsiders her own “metaphysical romance” thesis of four decades previous as a possible answer to the self-query: “Why did I jump the tracks, as it were, from realistic novels to dystopias?” The most immediate literary catalyst for Atwood’s first “ustopia,” The Handmaid’s Tale, is Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949): “I grew up with George Orwell. I was born in 1939, and Animal Farm was published in 1945.” Nineteen Eighty-Four, read by Atwood when she was in high school, made an even stronger impression upon her than the beast fable Animal Farm, for the novel dwelt in excruciating detail on what it was like to live “entirely within a [totalitarian] system.” Yet, Atwood doesn’t see Orwell’s great novel as unremittingly pessimistic, since it contains a final chapter, an essay on “Newspeak,” that seems to suggest that the nightmare totalitarian government has been abolished, and that some measure of sanity has been restored, signaled by a return to standard English; so too, as if in homage to Orwell, Atwood concludes A Handmaid’s Tale with an appendix reporting a symposium held several centuries in the future, in which the totalitarian right-wing-Christian regime has become, like so much else in tragic human history, “a subject for academic analysis.”
The hedonistic counterpart to Orwell’s nightmare state is, of course, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: “In the latter half of the twentieth century, two visionary books cast their shadows over our fut
ures.” Set beside Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huxley’s satirical utopia proposes “a different and softer form of totalitarianism—one of conformity achieved through engineered, bottle-grown babies and hypnotic persuasion rather than through brutality.” Brave New World posits an essentially infantilized society in which “free will” has been surrendered to the state in exchange for an unflagging, fatuous soma-produced “happiness”—“a world in which everything is available, [and] nothing has any meaning.” As a work of prose fiction Brave New World is itself, Atwood notes, lacking in depth—“All is surface”—“an effect not unlike a controlled hallucination.” Yet Huxley’s mock-utopia holds up very well seventy-five years after publication: “It was Huxley’s genius to present us to ourselves in all our ambiguity.”
Commenting on her own mock-utopia Oryx and Crake, Atwood notes that the “utopia-facilitating” element in this future society isn’t a new kind of social organization, mass brainwashing, or a “soul-engineering program,” but a transformation inside the human body: “This seems to be where ustopia is moving in real life as well: through genetic engineering.” Atwood’s trilogy of speculative fictions—concluding with The Year of the Flood—is characterized by a kind of historical realism, or plausibility: the author has taken care not to include in the novels anything that human beings have not already done, or are not likely to do, given certain circumstances; there is no reliance upon “other worlds” in the conventional SF sense of alien infiltration. If there is species-destruction, it will be intra-species.
In other, less formally focused chapters in In Other Worlds, Atwood discusses prevailing SF themes in individual works of fiction—from the “rip-roaring” She of Rider Haggard and the brilliant “scientific romance” of H. G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau, to Atwood’s contemporaries Kazuo Ishiguro and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). Atwood interprets Piercy’s novel as not a seriously flawed realist novel as reviewers had believed it to be at the time of publication but rather as an attempt at presenting a “utopia”—though for all her enthusiasm Atwood isn’t able to summon much convincing evidence that this novel, seemingly in thrall to the quasi-visionary novels of Doris Lessing, is anything other than a mismatch of utopian/feminist notions attached to an improbable and sometimes “whimsical” plot.
One of the seminal texts in Atwood’s life as a reader and writer is the pop-classic She, an adventure-quest saga in which intrepid Englishmen set out for Africa to hunt the beautiful “Queen of the Amahaggar, ‘She-who-must-be-obeyed.’” Atwood’s Harvard doctoral dissertation was to have been on nineteenth-century Victorian “quasi-goddesses”; the “she” of Haggard’s novel is squarely in this tradition, albeit “she” is the suffocatingly good Victorian woman in reverse. Atwood convincingly interprets Haggard’s demonic heroine as a reaction to the “rise of ‘Woman’ in the nineteenth century, and with the hotly debated issues of her ‘true nature’ and her ‘rights,’ and also with the anxieties and fantasies these controversies generated.” If women were to acquire political power, what horrors would ensue? If she is revealed as not aligned with nature in the benign Wordsworthian sense of that term, is the goddess Darwinian? And what does this mean for men? Atwood ponders: “Would it be out of the question to connect the destructive Female Will, so feared by D. H. Lawrence and others, with the malign aspect of She?”
The most fastidiously decoded dystopias in In Other Worlds are the third voyage of Gulliver in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726)—“Of the Madness of Mad Scientists: Jonathan Swift’s Grand Academy”— and H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896)—“Ten Ways of Looking at The Island of Dr. Moreau.” Atwood posits the eccentric scientists of Swift’s Laputa and the Grand Academy of Lagado as precursors of the more malevolent-minded “mad scientists” of popular culture; they are precursors of Mary Shelley’s idealistic young Dr. Frankenstein (1818) as of Robert Lewis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll (1886) and of any number of deranged men of science in B-movie science fictions with titles like The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. Of all of these, Wells’s Dr. Moreau is the most demonic, as his trans-species experiments involve hideous physical suffering in helpless animal subjects; in fact, Moreau is the “god” of his island, very like the Old Testament Jehovah, the Creator who “makes” living things in His image. Is Wells suggesting that “Moreau is to his animals as God is to man”?—then God himself is accused of “cruelty and indifference.” In retrospect, Wells said of this early scientific romance of his, perhaps with some degree of boastfulness, that it was “a youthful piece of blasphemy.” Clearly The Island of Dr. Moreau is one of Atwood’s favorite dystopias, a touchstone of sorts for her private, post–Paradise Lost mythology.
Bryher’s novella-length Visa for Avalon is “an odd duck of a book. . . . Everyman meets The Pilgrim’s Progress crossed with ‘The Passing of Arthur’ with undertones of The Seventh Seal. . . . it would be stretching matters to call it an entirely successful work of art,” while Ishiguro’s heartrending parable Never Let Me Go is “a brilliantly executed book by a master craftsman who has chosen a difficult subject: ourselves, seen through a glass, darkly.” Atwood concludes In Other Worlds with several enigmatic sci-fi parables of her own, and as if to suggest the casual, non-scholarly nature of the undertaking, appendices comprised of “An Open Letter from Margaret Atwood to the Judson Independent School District” (who’d banned A Handmaid’s Tale in 2006) and “Weird Tales Covers of the 1930s” (“The ‘low art’ of one age often cribs from the ‘high art’ of the preceding one; and ‘high art’ just as frequently borrows from the most vulgar elements of its own times.”)
In Other Worlds is not, as Atwood acknowledges in her introduction, “a catalogue of science fiction, a grand theory about it, or a literary history.” It is “not a treatise, it is not definitive, it is not exhaustive, it is not canonical.” Still, one would have expected some consideration of an exemplary film like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which dramatizes many of the themes with which Atwood is concerned, as well as discussions of representative fictions by Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury (who is mentioned only in passing); conspicuous too is an omission of the feminist-SF work of Atwood’s older contemporary Doris Lessing, who speaks of her “space fiction” sequence Canopus in Argos as her most important work
Though this affable collection does not aspire to the kind of bravely original cultural overview that made Atwood’s Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972) such a valuable anatomy of Canadian literature, yet In Other Worlds is an excellent introduction to science fiction as a genre as well as an entertainingly written memoir of the author’s “lifelong relationship with a literary form, or forms, or subforms, both as reader and as writer.”
In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination
By Margaret Atwood
THE STORYTELLER OF THE “SHATTERED PERSONALITY”:
PATRICK McGRATH
“A psychiatrist introduced me to ideas of madness when I was eight years old. He was my father.”
So begins “Writing Madness,” Patrick McGrath’s wonderfully intimate memoir of his childhood spent on the grounds of Broadmoor Lunatic Asylum in rural Berkshire, England. In the top-security facility, formerly known as the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, McGrath’s distinguished psychiatrist-father Pat McGrath was the tenth (and last) medical superintendent of what had become, since Victorian times, an “obsolete, overcrowded” and “decrepit” asylum housing eight hundred mentally ill women and men. (Broadmoor was originally designed to hold no more than five hundred inmates.) Yet, McGrath’s childhood seems to have been idyllic in unexpected ways, as he explains in this essay and in its companion, “A Boy’s Own Broadmoor.” For it was on the grounds of Broadmoor (comprising 170 acres including a farm) that the young writer-to-be first learned of such illnesses as schizophrenia—not a “split personality” (a popular misconception) but a “shattered personality.” Like Edgar Allan Poe, whom McGrath avidly read as a bo
y, he became fascinated by the “disintegrating mind”—“a vein of black gold.”
The elder McGrath appears to have been an admirable father, as he was an unusually liberal, reform-minded and generous psychiatric administrator who made every effort to involve his family in the routines of the asylum, like attending church services with inmates and making the acquaintance of the less seriously ill. Dr. McGrath “wanted the outside world inside the Wall, and the patients outside it, as often as possible”; the hope was to “break down institutional isolation”—with the result that the young McGrath seems to have experienced the utter naturalness of what the world labels “madness” and the fluidity of such definitions as “madness” and “mental health.” It is touching to learn that, at Broadmoor, theatrical productions performed by the asylum’s drama society the “Broadhumoorists” included, by tradition, the figure of an escaped lunatic “regardless of the plot.”
Not surprisingly, Dr. McGrath had hoped that his son might become a doctor, a psychiatrist like himself, and we see how, in his remarkably knowledgeable and sympathetic fiction, Patrick McGrath has internalized the psychiatric analyst with his predilection for the revelatory sign or image and the instinct to provide a narrative—a “case history”—to dramatize what might otherwise be too obscure and private to comprehend. McGrath brings to his wildly inventive, often luridly “gothic” fiction a talent for storytelling that looks back to our great nineteenth-century predecessors (Poe, Mary Shelley, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Ambrose Bierce among others) even as it is wholly contemporary in its wry, dark humor.
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