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Having written about dark and bleak futures in which human organs are grown en-masse inside pigs, or where fertile women are used as valuable commodities, or where humans can be grown in a lab and genetically altered, you could be forgiven for thinking Booker Prize Winner Margaret Atwood was a science fiction writer.
In her latest book In Other Worlds, however, this is a claim she adamantly denies. To describe what her books are, Atwood coins a new genre; her books, she writes, only deal with things ‘that humanity has done, is doing, or could start doing tomorrow’. They are not, she tells us, science fiction, but rather speculative fiction.
First off, I don’t recommend buying the book. It’s £19 for around 15 essays amounting to some 200 or so pages. What’s more, many of the essays (I counted five) have already appeared in a previous Atwood essay collection Curious Pursuits (which, by the way, is a book I most definitely would recommend).
On top of the essays, Atwood has included some new ‘speculative’ short stories. The problem is that by ‘new’ I mean one has already appeared in The Blind Assassin (again, a book I so recommend), and by ‘short’ I mean really short (one is a page and a half).
As for the essays themselves, they range quite greatly in subject matter; from critiques of authors as varied as HG Wells and Kazou Ishiguro, an autobiographical reflection on the author’s early childhood imaginary worlds, her response to an American college that banned her book The Handmaids Tale, and a really fascinating reflection on the history and development of the sci-fi genre that are all, admittedly, well worth a read. But, come on, £19? At least wait for the paperback…
So on to the crux of this book; Atwood’s denial of the sci-fi genre. Now, as much as I adore this Canadian Literary Genius, I’m just not buying it (the argument I mean, as for the book itself I’m already £19 down).
She can nit-pick all she wants, but there is of course another reason authors would like to steer clear of the sci-fi shelves. Despite it being on a par with crime as the bestselling sub-genre today, any reference to monsters, the future, or guys in jumpsuits is still enough to make the literary snobs out there recoil in disgust (you would struggle, for example, to name the last science-fiction novel to win the Booker Prize. That’s because, in its 42 year history, there has never been one). Ms Atwood is, for good reason, protecting her books from being relegated to the barren ghettos of the book world.
Of course she’s not the only one doing so. A trip to any mainstream fiction section could bring up any number of surprises, from organ-farmed clones in Kazou Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (a book Atwood describes brilliantly as ‘Enid Blyton crossed with Bladerunner’), and cannibal scavengers in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, to mass-produced, home-grown fast food servers in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.
And that’s before you even consider the purpose-bred humans of Brave New World and the Telescreen technology and Newspeak of 1984. Next to them, a story about a height-deficient band of brothers carrying a ring to a volcano seems almost, well, mundane. It would seem that as much as they’d try to deny it, even the stuffiest of closed-minded literary critics just loves a splash of the unbelievable.
There is, of course, no exact science (pun very much intended) to classifying books, but the general principle would appear to go something like this; dragons - fantasy, spaceships - sci-fi, and everything else can receive entry into the hallowed ground of general fiction (especially, it must be said, if Hollywood has taken an interest…).
Even though her books may contain scientists whose science experiments go horribly wrong, it would seem that Ms Atwood has avoided the dreaded net of science fiction for now. Not that it makes any difference of course. If you told me to look for her books in the hardcore S&M section, she would probably still be my favourite author around…
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