In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [40]
9. At the Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald (1871) contains a huge flying female character—the North Wind—with an astonishing amount of hair.
10. “Someone once said …” Scott Symons, in conversation with the author.
11. Sexual dimorphism in fairy fantasy writing was common in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often featuring a large, long-haired female and a small boy. (See, for instance, Jean Ingelow, Mopsa the Fairy, 1910.) In later incarnations such as She and The Lord of the Rings, power substitutes for size.
12. Victorian Fairy Painting is the catalogue of the 1997 exhibit at the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
13. Tennyson and train tracks: “Locksley Hall,” 1835.
14. The “city upon a hill” phrase was quoted by George W. Bush, twice, 2000 and 2001.
15. Greg Grandin, Fordlandia, 2010; Eduardo Sguiglia, Fordlandia, 2000.
16. Emile Zola, Germinal, 1885.
“Don’t let the bastards get you down.” A tattoo inspired by The Handmaid’s Tale belonging to Kat Thomas, co-creator of BiblioBabes.ca. Tattoo by Captain Matt of CaptainMatt.ca:
An Introductory Note
When I began looking through my past publications in search of other pieces about SF and related topics, I found I’d written quite a lot more on this subject than I’d remembered and started quite a bit earlier. My first such published article—on H. Rider Haggard’s She—dates back to 1965.
I’ve chosen to begin with an excerpt from a review of Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time that appeared in 1976. It’s clear that I was pondering the problems of utopia/dystopia writing at least nine years before I wrote The Handmaid’s Tale. The other nine pieces range from an introduction to She to an examination of Jonathan Swift’s science academy in Book III of Gulliver’s Travels and touch on everything from the forms of dictatorships to human genetic engineering.
I’ve done some light editing to remove some overlaps and repetitions, but otherwise the pieces are as originally published.
Woman on
the Edge of Time
by Marge Piercy
None of the reviews of Woman on the Edge of Time I’ve read to date seems even to have acknowledged its genre. Most have assumed that the book is intended as a realistic novel, for that is certainly how it starts out. It appears to be the slice-of-life story of a thirty-seven-year-old Chicana welfare recipient named Consuelo, whose past history we are given in the first few pages of the book. Consuelo had a child, was deserted by her husband, and subsequently took up with a black, blind pickpocket whose death drove her into a depression in which she accidently broke her daughter’s wrist. For this offence she was committed to a mental institution and has had her child taken away from her. The only person left for her to love is her doped-up prostitute niece Dolly, but in defending Dolly she breaks the nose of Dolly’s pimp and is recommitted by him. The rest of the book takes place “inside” (with one escape and one visit to the outside), and the descriptions of institutional life are enough to make the reader believe that Connie will be driven mad by sadistic doctors and indifferent attendants. This part of the book is rendered in excruciating, grotty, Zolaesque detail, pill by deadening pill, meal by cardboard meal, ordeal by ordeal, and as a rendition of what life in a New York bin is like for those without money or influence it is totally convincing and depressing.
However, even before Connie is recommitted she has been having visits from a strange creature named Luciente. Luciente turns out to be a visitor from the future; Connie thinks the visitor is a young man and is surprised when she is revealed as a woman. By making contact with Connie’s mind, Luciente can help Connie project herself into the world of the future, Luciente’s world. Connie travels there extensively, and needless to say the reader goes with her.
Some reviewers treated this part of the book as a regrettable daydream or even a hallucination caused by Connie’s madness.