In Other Worlds -Science Fiction and the Human Imagination by Margaret Atwood

First of all, sorry for the silence these past few weeks. I've spent more of my free time reading than blogging which is a good thing, isn't it? :) The downside is that now I have quite a few books I want to blog about queued up... Better get on with it then... :)

I've been interested in Margaret Atwood's writing ever since I took a course on feminist classics during the early days of my university studies. The course was about non-fiction (de Beauvoir, Millett, Firestone, Woolf etc.), but the lecturer happened to mention a novel by a certain Canadian author. :) That novel, of course, was The Handmaid's Tale.

I must have known about Atwood before that, I worked part-time in a library after all, but the lecturer talking about The Handmaid's Tail is my first recollection of the writer or her work and I was immediately intrigued. I just had to find a copy of The Handmaid's Tale to read as soon as possible! Working in a library helped there. :) I read the book and I loved it so much! I have reread it since and I still love it! During the years I have read other novels by Atwood, but The Handmaid's Tale is, and probably always will be, my favorite of all her work. It just might be, however, that the (mostly) non-fiction collection of some of her science fiction related writings In Other Worlds -Science Fiction and the Human Imagination, is now my second favorite!

Atwood herself describes the collection as "an exploration of [her] own lifelong relation with a literary form, or forms, or subforms, both as reader and as writer." (p. 1.) After first stating what the book is and is not about she then goes on telling us about her first forays as a child into writing what might be called SF: Blue Bunny and White Bunny the flying, superhero rabbits. :)

In Other Worlds is divided into three parts. In the first part she writes about her own personal history with SF starting with the above mentioned flying, superhero rabbits and ending with a chapter about ustopias (her own word that combines utopias and dystopias) and how she ended up writing about them. The second part includes articles by her about science fiction novels by others and the final part brings to us few short SF fiction pieces by Atwood herself.

I'm not a great fan of memoirs or biographies in general and of writers in particular. There are exeptions to this, but in general I rather let the fiction speak for itself than yearn to find out details of the writer's life. Atwood's recollection of her childhood reading experiences, however, were a treat, a funny treat! She no doubt has a great sense of humour. :) But she also weaves her personal experiences into something more in explaining the history, or maybe it is prehistory, of SF. I cannot help but include this quote (again there are those rabbits:)) to illustrate that in a small scale:

"Mythology, science fiction of the other-planetary kind, and modern technology: they all do fit together. At first glimpse, mythology might seem to be the odd one out, being ancient rather than ultra-modern; but as we have seen in the case of Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel, this is very far from begin the case.
In fact, all the most salient features of these early comicbook heroes - and thus my own flying rabbits, closely related to them except for the ears and tails - have deep roots in literary and cultural history, and possibly the human psyche itself." (p. 20)

As I mentioned above the middle part of the book is a collection of pieces written about various landmark texts of SF and I must confess that these articles were bad for my TBR-list! :) I had already earlier decided to read Brave New World by Adolux Huxler and The Birthday of the Worlds and Other Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin (Atwood dedicated In Other Worlds to Le Guin) this year, but now I also want to read She by H. Rider Haggard, Visa for Avalon by Bryher and The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells, as well as reread Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro! And it would also be interesting to reread The Blind Assassin and Oryx and Crake. And I haven't even read The Year of the Flood yet. Oh my!

All in all In Other Worlds is an interesting -and funny- collection of articles by one of the greatest writers of our time. There was not one text in this collection that wasn't a pleasure to read. All texts were interesting, some were thought-provoking, some were eye-opening. I would have never thought that I might want to read The Island of Doctor Moreau, a book I have always ticked off as a horror book not to my taste, but after reading Atwood's article about the novel I've completely changed my opinion! In Other Worlds in a must read for any Atwood and/or SF fan.