In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [0]
FICTION
The Edible Woman
Surfacing
Lady Oracle
Dancing Girls
Life Before Man
Bodily Harm
Murder in the Dark
Bluebeard’s Egg
The Handmaid’s Tale
Cat’s Eye
Wilderness Tips
Good Bones
The Robber Bride
Alias Grace
The Blind Assassin
Good Bones and Simple Murders
Oryx and Crake
The Penelopiad
The Tent
Moral Disorder
The Year of the Flood
POETRY
Double Persephone
The Circle Game
The Animals in That Country
The Journals of Susanna Moodie
Procedures for Underground
Power Politics
You Are Happy
Selected Poems
Two-Headed Poems
True Stories
Interlunar
Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New 1976–1986
Morning in the Burned House
The Door
NONFICTION
Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature
Days of the Rebels 1815–1840
Second Words
Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature
Two Solicitudes: Conversations (with Victor-Lévy Beaulieu)
Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing
Moving Targets: Writing with Intent 1982–2004
Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose 1983–2005
Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth
FOR CHILDREN
Up in the Tree
Anna’s Pet (with Joyce Barkhouse)
For the Birds
Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut
Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes
Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda
Copyright © 2011 by O.W. Toad Ltd.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese / Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.nanatalese.com
DOUBLEDAY is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc. Nan A. Talese and the colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Simultaneously published in Canada by Signal, an imprint of McClelland & Stewart Ltd., Toronto.
Jacket design by Michael J. Windsor
Jacket photograph by Alex and Felix. www.alexandfelix.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Atwood, Margaret, 1939–
In other worlds : SF and the human imagination / Margaret Atwood. — 1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
1. Atwood, Margaret, 1939—Knowledge—Literature. 2. Atwood, Margaret, 1939—Knowledge—Science fiction. 3. Science fiction—History and criticism. 4. Science fiction—Authorship. I. Title.
PR9199.3.A8Z545 2011
813’.54—dc22 2011013776
eISBN: 978-0-385-53397-3
v3.1
For Ursula K. Le Guin
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination
Flying Rabbits: Denizens of Distant Spaces
Burning Bushes: Why Heaven and Hell Went to Planet X
Dire Cartographies: The Roads to Ustopia
Other Deliberations
An Introductory Note
Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
H. Rider Haggard’s She
The Queen of Quinkdom: The Birthday of the World and Other Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin
Arguing Against Ice Cream: Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age by Bill McKibben
George Orwell: Some Personal Connections
Ten Ways of Looking at The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
After the Last Battle: Visa for Avalon by Bryher
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Of the Madness of Mad Scientists: Jonathan Swift’s Grand Academy
Five Tributes
An Introductory Note
Cryogenics: A Symposium
Cold-Blooded
Homelanding
Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet
“The Peach Women of Aa’A” from The Blind Assassin
Appendices
An Open Letter from Margaret Atwood to the Judson Independent School District
Weird Tales Covers of the 1930s
Acknowledgements
Permissions Acknowledgements
About the Author
Introduction
I’m a fifty-three-year-old writer who can remember being a ten-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an eighty-year-old writer.
OCTAVIA BUTLER
Steel and Dotty (War in Mischiefland) by Margaret Atwood:
In Other Worlds is not a catalogue of science fiction, a grand theory about it, or a literary history of it. It is not a treatise, it is not definitive, it is not exhaustive, it is not canonical. It is not the work of a practising academic