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At a time when speculative fiction seems less and less far-fetched, Margaret Atwood lends her distinctive voice and singular point of view to the genre in a series of essays that brilliantly illuminates the essential truths about the modern world. This is an exploration of her relationship with the literary form we have come to know as "science fiction," a relationship that has been lifelong, stretching from her days as a child reader in the 1940s, through her time as a graduate student at Harvard, where she worked on the Victorian ancestor of the form, and continuing as a writer and reviewer. This book brings together her three heretofore unpublished Ellmann Lectures from 2010: "Flying Rabbits," which begins with Atwood's early rabbit superhero creations and goes on to speculate about masks, capes, weakling alter egos, and Things with Wings; "Burning Bushes," which follows her into Victorian otherlands and beyond; and "Dire Cartographies," which investigates Utopias and Dystopias. In Other Worlds also includes some of Atwood's key reviews and thoughts about the form. Among those writers discussed are Marge Piercy, Rider Haggard, Ursula Le Guin, Ishiguro, Bryher, Huxley, and Jonathan Swift. She elucidates the differences (as she sees them) between "science fiction" proper and "speculative fiction," as well as between "sword and sorcery/fantasy" and "slipstream fiction." For all readers who have loved The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood, In Other Worlds is a must.… (more)
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Ursula K. le Guin once said that Atwood didn't want any of her work labeled "science fiction," but that isn't entirely true. The two women later had a discussion and realized their working definitions of "science fiction" and "speculative fiction" were sort of overlapping. I think that's why Atwood uses "SF" in the title rather than something written out. She talks extensively about the use of the terminology in one section of the book.
Another term that Atwood uses when talking about utopias/dystopias is "ustopia." Each utopia or dystopia contains the seeds of its opposite, therefore necessitating a combined term, in Atwood's opinion. She talked a lot about the terms and what they mean and evoke, and how they've been viewed in various novels, including hers.
A portion of the book is book reviews or essays about various books that seem to fall into the SF category in one way or the other. She discusses these books at length and their ramifications.
I this book to be fascinating and intellectually rewarding. Some of the essays I did not find relevant to me, however, hence not having five stars.
What comes across most clearly in this book is her genuine love for the genre, in all its forms. In the first section, Atwood outlines her early experiences with sci fi and fantasy – covering everything from superhero comics and the lurid tales of bug-eyed monsters in sci fi magazines, to the tales of HG Wells and Ray Bradbury, to classics like Pilgrim’s Process and Beowulf. She describes herself as an indiscriminate reader, devouring in her early years everything she could get her hands on, with a healthy disregard for the adult distinctions of high- middle- and low-brow. Her breadth of knowledge is evident: she discusses Batman in the same breath as Shakespeare, and treats all of her subjects with the same level of respect due to any good story.
She goes on to discuss her experiences at university, studying literature with a focus on utopian and dystopian writing. This section is fascinating: Atwood discusses the motivations and psychology behind these types of writing, highlighting some more and less familiar examples of each. If you’re a fan of Margaret Atwood’s books, this section by itself is worth the price of the book for the insight it gives to the influences and inspiration for her novels.
The middle part of the book is a series of previously published essays on individual sci fi titles, including 1984, Brave New World, Never Let Me Go, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Gulliver’s Travels – some written as reviews, some as introductions to the books, etc. I found these essays equally illuminating for the books I’d actually read as for those I hadn’t – and the latter lead to quite a few additions to my to-read list! My only small criticism of the book come from this section – as these are all previously published, there is some repetition of ideas and themes, including some that had already been discussed in greater detail in the first section. This is to be expected really, but it did mean that it started to feel a bit familiar by the time I got to the end of this section.
The final section contains a series of Atwood’s own examples of sci fi writing – short stories, and extracts from some of her non-sci fi books (e.g. one of the stories told by the male protagonist in The Blind Assassin, “The Peach Women of A’Aa”, is included). Coming at the end of the book, these are fascinating to read as examples of how Atwood has used her extensive knowledge of sci fi to inform her own writing.
In Other Worlds is a thoughtful, intelligent exploration of the science fiction genre, from a writer who has extensive knowledge and a genuine love of her topic. Highly recommended for either fans of Margaret Atwood, science fiction, or both.
Ms. Atwood eschews any characterization as a “fan”, but she has an impressive grounding in the classics of the field, and an obvious appreciation for current anthropological and speculative fiction writers.
However, she sets the conflict out squarely in her introduction as she discusses an Oryx and Crake and Year of the Flood review by Ursula K. LeGuin, that “caused a certain amount of uproar in the skin-tight clothing and other-planetary communities” (p.5).
One of the most skillful writers in the world today didn’t include this belittling reference to people who love speculative fiction, myself included, by accident. Reading on was a bit of a chore after that, but worth it.
In this sometimes contradictory collection of essays, Atwood discusses her complex relationship, as a reader and as a writer, with science fiction. She defines science fiction as limited to “things that could not possibly happen” - rockets and rayguns, War of the World-type sf. Since her own speculative fiction does not fit into this category, it isn’t science fiction.
Atwood believes she writes speculative fiction, which she defines as “things that really could happen but just hadn’t completely happened when the author wrote the book” p6.
But of course, definitions of science fiction and fantasy are far more mutable. She acknowledges this even while continuing to distance her own work from the science fiction “label”.
These essays informed me, made me angry, amused me, and set me stalking around verbalizing counter-arguments for days. I may not agree with Margaret Atwood, but I always love reading her work.
Good for fans of Atwood, or fans of scifi, or whichever.
In In other worlds. SF and the human imagination explores her "relationship with the SF world, or world" (p. 5). The essays collected in this volume are grouped in three main sections. First, there are three essays which explore various forms of what Atwood would consider science fiction and the related genre or sub genre, fantasy. These essays (with footnotes) offer an historical overview of the development on the genre. The first essay, "Flying Rabbits" also contains an interesting discussion about the origins of the "outfits", i.e. the special costumes and regalia of some fantasy novel figures, such as superman, and batman, such as a mask, and cape or cloak. The essays are not a systematic history of the genre but offer a collection of tit-bit pieces of information about defining features of science fiction and fantasy fiction, including both literary fiction, graphic novels and other media. Ideas for this essay are based on Atwood’s own reading experience of novels belonging to this genre, when she was a child. Another such feature is, for example, the double identity. The double-identity pairs often represent good versus bad, in early novels, such as Robert Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Edgar Alan Poe's William Wilson. Atwood suggests that the archetype for such figures might be found in Jonathan Wild, who was a constable in daily life, but secretly as mastermind of crime. Jonathan Wild was a real historical person, an appears as a character in Jonathan Wild by Henry Fielding and Jack Sheppard by William Harrison Ainsworth.
Incidentally, Atwood also explains that the brand name Bovril, the base for beef broth, that sustained troops at the World War I front, cf Not So Quiet... Stepdaughters of War (1930) by Helen Zenna Smith, invented in 1870, comes from Bovine + Vril, from "vril", an electromagnetic substance which was harnessed by the super human race populating Edward Bulwer-Lytton science fiction novel, The Coming Race (1870).
The second essay, contains an exploration of the mythical in relation to science fiction, and religious overtones. This essays is inspired by Atwood's college experience taking classes with her Professors Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan during her student days at the University of Toronto. The last, and third essay, describes Atwood's view on Ustopias a word she coined, to capture the sense of continuity between utopias and dystopias. Ideas for this essay come from Margaret Atwood’s unfinished PhD dissertations “The English Metaphysical Romance” in which she describes the world of fairies, and other-than-human beings, and themes which in origin and subtext were of theological nature (p. 79).
The next part consists of essays and articles about science fiction and fantasy novels that were written between 1965 and 2010. Most essays cover literature and novels, that are classics or very well-known, such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or H.G Well’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, but there are also less obvious selections, such as Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy. Although in the short, interleaved introduction on page 99, the author writes that the essays have been edited for overlap, there is still quite a lot of overlap between the essays and all the other parts in the book. This degree of overlap also suggests a strong mutual interest between Ursula Le Guin and Margaret Atwood.
The last part of the book is taken up by excerpts from Margaret Atwood’s own work that illustrate or underwrite her ideas about science fiction. This part is followed by appendices.
In other worlds. SF and the human imagination does not offer a systematic overview of the genre of science fiction and fantasy, but it does cover a great deal of ground. It should more be considered as a personal exploration of its author of the genre, and a life time of ideas to various aspects and features of the genre. Atwood’s style of writing essays is rather facile, that is to say, while the essays do contain interesting pieces of information, the spread is thin, both for each essay, as well as for the collection as a whole. In addition to that, there is quite a lot of overlap between the essays and articles. The main purpose of In other worlds. SF and the human imagination is to answer the question as to whether some of Margaret Atwoods novels should be regarded as science fiction. The answer to that question is “no”, which is clarified by Atwood by defining both the genre of science fiction and her own work, and providing examples. However, this division and the definition seem a bit arbitrary and idiosyncratic. Then, too, although Atwood did not finish her dissertation, it shows that she has a well-informed view on the issue.
In other worlds. SF and the human imagination seems particularly interesting for readers with a more than average interest in science fiction and / or Margaret Atwood as an author. The first 100 pages of the book are the best and most interesting, although for a quick answer one only needs to read the 11-page introduction.
Oh look, I still love Margaret Atwood and everything she stands for. Surprise!