Margaret Atwood. in Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination

Margaret Atwood. In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. Virago 2011. 255 pp. £17.99. ISBN 978-1-84408-711-2.This volume falls into three parts: the Ellmann lectures which Margaret Atwood delivered in 2010, other critical discussions of science fiction, and a number of Atwood's own short pieces of SF. In her lead-off essay 'Flying Rabbits' she examines the nature of SF superheroes, drawing on her own early reading the Oz books, Rash Gordon, Superman and others. There is a broad polemic running throughout this volume that SF is central to the culture and offers writers a unique means of speculative dramatization. Atwood's title puns on the creation of other worlds and on the rhetorical formula for re-expressing a position ( 'in other words' ). The latter typically cues in alternatives while the tendency to produce other worlds is glossed by her as an 'essential property of the human imagination' (24). Not surprisingly, Jung figures repeatedly as a reference point in Atwood's discussion, as do Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye in helping her apply a notion of myth as a 'story central to our self -understanding' (54). Thus for her SF has consistently appealed to her since the 1940s, when she first began writing in this mode, as opening up methods of speculating about the limits and nature of humanity. In her introduction Atwood distinguishes between SF (the Wells tradition) and a line of speculative fiction represented by Verne, but in practice her discussion tends to blur the lines between the two. The only kind of SF conspicuous by its absence from these pages is the so-called 'hard SF' which privileges technology. Atwood's concerns focus much on Utopian writing and under the title 'Dire Cartographies' she includes material from an abandoned doctoral research project on 'ustopias', her own coinage which combines utopias and dystopias. This coinage reflects her conviction that within every utopia there is embedded a dystopia and vice versa. In this piece she reflects on the symbolic dimension to maps as codified representations of elsewhere, whose boundaries might mark the boundaries between the known and the unknown. Important though the writer's spatial imagination is, Atwood also insists that 'maps are frozen journeys' (70). In other words, mapping and narrative complement each other. Indeed, utopias, a form notorious for its narrative longeurs, is always framed by a double journey - there and back - which might or might not be described in detail.At this point another general characteristic of Atwood's argument emerges. Again and again she glances ironically at the domination of the fiction market by the realist novel and makes a point of citing examples from popular genres like murder mysteries or boys' adventure stories like Treasure Island. Apart from offering constantly thoughtful insights into the nature of SF, In Other Worlds also gives us fascinating glimpses of Atwood's own fiction. When surveying her Utopian novels, she explains that The Handmaid's Tale was triggered by a tour of the then Eastern bloc and was also informed by a historical guiding principle: ? would not put into this book anything that humankind had not already done' (88). The Year of the Flood was to have been called originally God's Gardeners, but the latter was rejected by US publishers on religious grounds. …