Words for Other Worlds

“When you’re 20,” Margaret Atwood tells me, “you think you’re going to die at 30. You don’t know the plot yet.”
A world-famous writer renowned for her dark tales and acerbic wit, Atwood is wonderfully warm in person. The most recent addition to her many awards is the Harvard Arts Medal, granted on May 1 as part of Harvard’s Arts First and LITfest celebrations. While on campus, Atwood participated in “Writer in the Parlor,” a series of conversations put on jointly by the Department of English and the Writing Department, after which she graciously agreed to speak with me about the role of science in her storytelling.
Two novels in particular motivated this conversation: The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake, each a painstakingly rendered future of human civilization, each singularly haunting. Readers are often dismayed to hear that Atwood rejects the label of science fiction for these works, preferring to call them speculative fiction, a distinction which may seem arbitrary to some. I hoped speaking with her would illuminate that choice.
Their Worlds: Huxley and Orwell in the 20th century
Atwood recently produced a meditation on the craft and taxonomy of science-inspired writing titled, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. In it she asserts that dystopias (and utopias, for that matter) must answer the same questions as real societies: Where do people live, what do they eat, what do they wear, what do they do about sex and child-rearing? Who has the power, who does the work, how do citizens relate to nature and how does the economy function?

A truly novel set of answers to these questions must of course be set in a future, an alternate universe, a distant planet, another “world.” This is the realm of canonical sci-fi. The written worlds of the 19th century tended to be utopic in nature, as people became inspired by scientific progress and infected with enthusiasm for what Atwood called “the perfectibility of man and society.” She cited William Morris’s News from Nowhere and W.H. Hudson’s A Crystal Age as examples of this optimistic zeitgeist.
Darwinism and two world wars halted this sense of enthusiasm. People began to write very different novels. In the 20th century, dystopia was the name of the game: Two towering icons on the playing field then as today are Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four—one a sickly-sweet hallucination of endless shopping malls and sex, unhappiness chemically removed at birth; the other a bone-chilling nightmare of war, surveillance, and “the discouraging spectacle of a boot stomping on a human face forever.”
Atwood has described the experience of reading them both in high school, as a budding writer, and spoke to me of the profound impressions each left on her. Each world asks of us as many questions as it answers: What is the value of art? Of the truth? What price should we pay for happiness? Or for safety?
Most poignantly, as she wonders throughout In Other Worlds, “Why is it that when we grab for heaven … we so often produce hell?”
Her Worlds: The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake
In real-world 1984, Atwood began a new set of answers to these world-creating questions, with a particular experiment in mind. Having noted that most dystopias to date had been told through the eyes of men, she spun The Handmaid’s Tale and told of a future from a woman’s perspective. In this not-too-distant time, America has been replaced by a totalitarian dictatorship, a social order based on a nasty set of maxims from the Old Testament, largely focused on the subjugation of women. The main character, Offred (literally “of-Fred”, her owner), is a “handmaid,” one of the few fertile women left in a world left largely sterile from pollution and disease. As a viable concubine, Offred is a valuable commodity.
The Handmaid’s Tale often nods to Brave New World—the color-coded outfits denote tiers of society, for example—but Orwell, not Huxley, is its true literary grandfather. Atwood makes similar use of language, to chilling effect: Women in her world are not enslaved but “improved”; a group murder ritual is a “Particicution” (a participation–execution); widows, feminists, lesbians, the sterile and the dissenting are “Unwomen.”
Three decades later Atwood wrote Oryx and Crake. This novel (and its siblings, The Year of the Flood and Maddaddam) paints a world in which we permit unbridled development of biotechnology for capitalistic ends. The first, Oryx and Crake, is a uniquely disturbing exploration of the possibility that at any moment, someone, somewhere, might just see humanity heading for disaster and have both the will and the means to, as Atwood put it, “triage.” In her novel this someone is Crake, who has a vision of wiping the slate of humanity clean and starting over with a re-engineered, faultless version. We are given the vantage point of his best friend Jimmy, who looks on unwittingly as Crake enacts this cleansing. In this novel the capacities of genetic engineering are painstakingly well-researched, achieving a chilling realism Huxley could only have dreamt of in 1932.
These are her dystopias. To say that The Handmaid’s Tale is a nightmare about religion and Oryx and Crake is one about science would be a vast oversimplification, as elements of each run through both, and each has played an important role in Atwood’s literary career. She identifies as a strict agnostic—“you can’t present as knowledge what is in fact faith”—but having grown up in Canada in the ‘50s, knows quite a lot about religion, particularly Christianity. You cannot study literature without it, she said, as “its footprints are everywhere.”
Her engagement with science is profound and perpetual, part of a “feedback loop” with her storytelling. She keeps abreast of scientific advancements via publications like Scientific American, Discovery and New Scientist, and finds the seeds of many stories therein—“science is, after all, still a narrative art.” Atwood’s older brother often critiques her drafts: Renowned Canadian neurophysiologist H.L. Atwood trims the hedges of the outlandish flora which grow from those intellectual seeds, and a frequent scribbler, according to his sister, of “not likely!” in the margins of her manuscripts.
Our World: Authorial Intent and Authorial Responsibility
Atwood is an artist aware of her audience. “The reader is the performer of a book,” she said during the “Writer in the Parlor” conversation. “You can write a story down, but it’s not incarnate until someone reads it.”
What might we then deduce about authorial intent? Atwood’s first epigraph to Oryx and Crake is taken from Gulliver’s Travels: “my principal design was to inform you, and not to amuse you.” When asked directly, she called each of her dystopias not a cautionary tale per se but a thought experiment, an extended what if? In her words, “What if we continue down the road we’re already on? How slippery is the slope? What are our saving graces? Who’s got the will to stop us?” Her writing gathers the most troubling threads she can find today—in the courtroom, in the laboratory—and weaves of them something new; a world foreign and disturbing but not unrecognizable, made from the same stuff as ours.
And on this authorial intention hinges the taxonomy. “Speculative fiction” fits much more snugly around thought experimentation than does “science fiction,” which embraces many other types of stories, adventure and romance and mythology, whose aims are different from hers. Atwood wants above all for us to know that the deeply uncomfortable worlds she paints are entirely possible. Her insistence upon the word “speculative” is not arbitrary but apt, indeed crucial; it clarifies her intent and helps us situate these novels where they belong on the shelf, comfortably between Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as the next generation of too-close-to-home dystopias.
In many ways, her worlds are already our world. In The Handmaid’s Tale, she set herself a boundary that she would not write a single act into the book that humans had not already done, somewhere, at some time. Even the most shocking elements of her tale have historical and literary precedents; she simply weaves them together. One is reminded of George R.R. Martin’s defense, when accused of writing excessive cruelty into his wildly popular series, A Song of Fire and Ice: “The Red Wedding is based on a couple real events … No matter how much I make up, there’s stuff in history that’s just as bad, or worse.” Even at their worst, these books are mirrors.
As Harvard University President Drew Faust said at the Arts Medal award ceremony, Atwood’s writing makes us “see into and beyond ourselves—who we are, what we might become.” She is our tour guide through the darkest halls of human depravity. Atwood herself described the promise of a writer to her readers as that of Virgil to Dante: “I will show you hell; I will take you there and then I will get you out again.” What to do with knowledge of hell, when we emerge, is up to us.
Fellow novelist and Canadian Alistair MacLeod said that writers tend to write about what worries them. At the beginning of our conversation I asked Margaret Atwood if she keeps up with scientific advancements. When she answered yes, I asked if they worried her. She smiled.
“Not really. I already know the plot.”
Image credit: Cambridge WickedLocal