In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [30]
Reporters and messages naturally require some means of transmission. Perhaps no other genre has so concerned itself with information systems as has SF, especially that of the ustopian kind. Various methods have been employed by various authors. There are diaries and journals left by the literary descendants of Robinson Crusoe in the hope that someone in the future may read them; there are strange manuscripts found in copper cylinders; there are metal books, and crystal encoding systems, and hieroglyphs that need deciphering. There are language barriers to be overcome, there are catastrophes resulting in mass memory and information loss—Stanislaw Lem’s Memoirs Found in a Bathtub postulates a worldwide meltdown caused by a nanobioform that eats paper, for example, thus creating the equivalent of a worldwide library-burning.
Some writers just skip the message-transmission system and resort to straight third-person narration, or allow the narrator to address us from limbo. But any writer of ustopias has to answer three necessary questions: where is it, when is it, and—in relation to maps—what shape is it? For unless we readers can believe in the ustopia as a potentially mappable place, we will not suspend our disbelief willingly.
Flying warriors; princesses and knights, by Harold L. Atwood:
I came early to maps, though not altogether by choice. My older brother was an inveterate map-maker. Not only did he devise follow-the-clue maps for me, but he drew many maps of imaginary places on other planets. The lands he described were often islands, as is the real estate for sale on the virtual-reality site Second Life—islands are more comprehensible and easily defined than countries with contingent borders. While mapping Neptune and Venus, my brother also took to mapping the very island we were then living on, naming each bay, swamp, promontory, peninsula, and offshore island. Once those places had names, it was, strangely enough, easier to find your way to them.
Naming is of course an aid to memory: attach a name to a place and you have a proto-map. The physical maps are only the outward and visible manifestations of inner and neurological maps—the things drawn or, in the case of the northern Canadian Inuit, carved, in three dimensions on pieces of wood that could float if your kayak tipped. And, as with anything brainiac, practise makes bigger: those who study the brains of taxi drivers in London, where apprentice taxi drivers have to learn the city by memory and then pass a difficult test, report that the mapping areas of the taxi drivers’ brains—those parts having to do with spatial orientation and visualization—are larger and denser than those in the brains of the rest of us.
In addition to being, almost always, a mapped location, ustopia is also a state of mind, as is every place in literature of whatever kind. As Mephistopheles in Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus tells us, Hell is not only a physical space. “Why this is Hell, nor am I out of it,” he says:
Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib’d
In one self place; but where we are is hell,
And where hell is, there must we ever be.
Or, to cite a more positive version, from Milton’s Paradise Lost:
… then wilt thou not be loath
To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess
A Paradise within thee, happier farr.
In literature, every landscape is a state of mind, but every state of mind can also be portrayed by a landscape. And so it is with ustopia.
How did I myself come to create my own ustopias—these not-exactly places, which are anywhere but nowhere, and which are both mappable locations and states of mind?
It was an indirect journey. I’d decided that I was a writer when I was