In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [5]
Some say that the art one makes as an adult supplies the absence of things longed for in childhood. I don’t know whether or not this is true. If I’d been able to create that windmill, would I have become a writer? Would I have become a writer of SF? We’ll never know the answer to that question, but it’s one theory.
Meanwhile—in gravely altered form—here is the windmill. I hope you have as much fun with it as I have had.
NOTES
1. The quotation by Octavia Butler appears in the About the Author note at the back of her novel Parable of the Sower.
2. Dick and Jane was a school reader series of the 1940s.
3. The New Scientist article appeared in the November 18, 2008, issue, under the general heading “The future of a genre.”
4. “The Wall” is the Berlin Wall.
5. The Lizard Men of Xenor appear in my novel The Blind Assassin, in the chapter of that name.
6. Ursula K. Le Guin’s review appears in the Guardian, August 29, 2009.
7. The public discussion with Ursula Le Guin took place in Portland, Oregon, on September 23, 2010, as part of the Portland Arts and Lectures series.
8. Bruce Sterling’s essay “Slipstream” was originally published in SF Eye #5, July 1989.
9. Des Knaben Wunderhorn was a collection of German folkloric material published between 1805 and 1808.
10. Tinkertoy was a pre-Lego assembly set.
Paper puppets by Margaret Atwood:
Animals of Neptune by Harold L. Atwood:
Flying Rabbits:
Denizens
of Distant Spaces
The child was already in the air, buoyed on his wings, which he did not flap to and fro as a bird does, but which were elevated over his head, and seemed to bear him steadily aloft without effort of his own.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON, The Coming Race
I have spoken of the shaman and the folktale hero, of privation that is transformed into lightness and makes possible a flight into a realm where every need is magically fulfilled.
ITALO CALVINO, “Lightness,” Six Memos for the New Millennium
That which we do not bring to consciousness appears in our lives as fate.
C. G. JUNG
Flying Rabbits (in balloons) by Margaret Atwood:
I entered the sort of modern wonder-tale world we might generally label SF at an early age. I grew up largely in the north woods of Canada, where our family spent the springs, summers, and falls. My access to cultural institutions and artifacts was limited: not only were there no electrical appliances, furnaces, flush toilets, schools, or grocery stores, there was no TV, no radio shows available except for those on short-wave Russian stations, no movies, no theatre, and no libraries. But there were a lot of books. These ranged from scientific textbooks to detective novels, with everything in between. I was never told I couldn’t read any of them, however unsuitable some of them may have been.
I learned to read early so I could read the comic strips because nobody else would take the time to read them out loud to me. The newspaper comics pages were called, then, the funny papers, although a lot of the strips were not funny but highly dramatic, like Terry and the Pirates, which featured a femme fatale called “The Dragon Lady” who used an amazingly long cigarette holder, or oddly surreal, like Little Orphan Annie—where were her eyes? The funny papers raised many questions in my young mind, some of which remain unanswered to this day. What exactly happened when Mandrake the Magician “gestured hypnotically”? Why did the Princess Snowflower character go around with a cauliflower on either ear? And if those weren’t cauliflowers, what were they?
In addition to being a comics reader, I was an early writer, and I drew a lot: drawing and reading were the main recreations available in the woods, especially when it was raining. Very little of what I wrote or drew was in any way naturalistic, and in this I suspect I was like other children. Those under the age of eight gravitate more