In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [4]
But surely all draw from the same deep well: those imagined other worlds located somewhere apart from our everyday one: in another time, in another dimension, through a doorway into the spirit world, or on the other side of the threshold that divides the known from the unknown. Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Sword and Sorcery Fantasy, and Slipstream Fiction: all of them might be placed under the same large “wonder tale” umbrella.
This book is arranged in three parts. The first part, “In Other Worlds,” is a personal history of sorts. Its three chapters have as their genesis the Ellman Lectures I delivered at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, in the fall of 2010. The first chapter, “Flying Rabbits,” explores my involvement with SF and superheroes as a child, with some thoughts on the deep origins of such superhero features as body-hugging outfits, otherworldly origins, double identities, and flying. The second chapter, “Burning Bushes,” is concerned with my undergraduate interest in ancient mythologies, which both pre-date and inform SF. It then goes on to speculate on the differences between realistic fictions and the other kinds, and on the positive and negative capabilities of each.
The third chapter, “Dire Cartographies,” is partly about my unfinished Ph.D. thesis, which was about a number of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fictions I collected together under the label “The Metaphysical Romance.” What intrigued me about the books I was studying were the supernatural female figures in them, the realms these inhabited, and the Wordsworthian/Darwinian split in the visions of nature they represented. These explorations led me to utopias and dystopias, of which the Victorian non-realists and those who continued to write in their traditions were very fond. “Dire Cartographies” is thus also about the three novels I myself have so far written that might be viewed as a continuation of these literary traditions.
The second part, “Other Deliberations,” gathers together some of my many pieces of writing about specific works of SF over the years. Some are reviews, some are introductions, others were originally radio talks. Why did I choose these particular works of SF to write about? you may wonder. But I didn’t choose them, exactly: in each case, someone else asked me to write about them, and I was unable to resist.
The third part, “Five Tributes,” is a group of my own mini-SF pieces. These were selected from among the many such that I have written over the decades, and each draws on recognizable memes from the genre. Four are self-contained miniatures, but the last one—“The Peach Women of Aa’A”—is from my novel The Blind Assassin, one of whose main characters is a writer of pulp-magazine science fiction during the early years of what is referred to as the golden age.
So that is what this book is about. It’s about my somewhat tangled personal history with SF, first as a child, then as an adolescent, then as a one-time student and academic, then as a reviewer and commentator, and then, finally, as a composer.
But where does all of this come from—the reading, the writing, the engagement, and especially the wilder storms on the wilder seas of invention? Everyone wants to know this about writers: What is your inspiration, what put you up to it? They’re never satisfied with such explanations as “Because it was there” or “I don’t know what came over me.” They want specifics.
So let me try this:
As a young child, living briefly in the winter of 1944–5 in an old house in Sault Ste. Marie, I used to get up before anyone else was awake and climb to the cold but spacious attic, where in a state of solipsistic bliss I would build strange habitations and quasi-people with a bunch of sticks and spools