In Atwood's World

In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination by Margaret Atwood

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a personal collection of essays and book reviews by Margaret Atwood, with a few sci-fi excerpts at the end, that is a pleasure to read if you are a fan of the genre. She travels through the genre's more popular and well known texts (and a few films), starting from her own discovery of it as a child, through her studies as a university student until her more recent lectures as a published author. She sticks with texts from sci-fi's mainstream and general themes, like utopias and dystopias, that have stayed with the genre from its birth. They are the departing points for her ruminations on why these works had an impact on her own work and life.

Her well known "controversy" surrounding speculative fiction vs science fiction is here - it turns out that what she calls "science fiction" is "fantasy" for many other sci-fi writers (like Ursula K. Le Guin). I've read some reviews which call this collection a very limited look at sci-fi, which I think is unfair since Atwood herself makes it clear in her first paragraph that she's not presenting essays meant to be canonical or definitive. If anything, she goes along way to opening the genre to readers who are sceptical about it. (If you know anyone who doesn't like sci-fi, give them this book!)

I'd love to read Ursula K. Le Guin's collection of essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Language of the Night, and see how they sit alongside Atwood's. One of the best essays in this collection is a review of one of Le Guin's collection of short stories; I wonder whether Le Guin included any thoughts on Atwood's work in her collection?

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