muninnhuginn | Seeing the (At)wood for the Trees

Well, we were all set to launch ourselves into a "The lady protests too much, methinks" diatribe. The intro in today's emailed headlines from the NY Times went as follows:

"Margaret Atwood explains why her new novel, in which mankind faces extinction through its own devices, should be called speculative fiction."

Oh no, we thought, not again. Not more disparaging references to betentacled aliens. We almost didn't bother reading the article itself. Been there, done that, boggled at the notion of Atwood trying to wriggle out of the definition of some of her fiction as science fiction (imagines slight shudder as if encountering something distasteful) even though we know that's just what it is and that's just fine (and some of her fiction isn't sf, and we can forgive that, too). But we read it anyway, just to see: Hand-Wringer's Tale of Tomorrow. (It has to be said that the not-entirely complementary sounding "hand-wringer" got us interested!)

Well, there are no aliens mentioned at all. The sf versus speculative fiction debate isn't as prominent as it has been in other interviews. So what does the article say?

Not since "The Handmaid's Tale" in 1986 has Ms. Atwood focused her imagination on a dystopian future.

To some readers "Oryx and Crake" may seem fantastical. For its author it is real. In a recent interview in New York, she said that almost all the strange events and transformations in the book could happen, and that some had already happened....

The author of the article, Mel Gussow, has set up a second pairing: fantastical and real. The fantastical, or at least a definition of fantasy, comes up again later on.

Although some reviewers have categorized the book as science fiction, Ms. Atwood considers it speculative fiction, and to clear the air she defined those two forms and also defined fantasy fiction.

Fantasy, she said, is "largely mythic and Celtic in inspiration" and deals with "dragons, magic swords and chalices that glow in the sky." She offered "The Lord of the Rings" and the "Harry Potter" series as examples. Science fiction, she said, deals with "technologies we don't yet have, other universes," as in "Star Trek" and "Star Wars."
In contrast, speculative fiction is "this planet," she said. It doesn't use things we don't already have or are not already developing. `Beam me up, Scotty' is not speculative fiction. We don't yet have the ability to disintegrate people and have them reassembled in some other place."

Then she said about "Oryx and Crake," "Had I written it 20 years ago, I would have called it science fiction, but now it's speculative fiction, believe me."

Well, there's lots to quibble with in there: like the definition of fantasy, for a start, that perhaps could stand as a subset of the notion of epic fantasy--a term explicitly left undefined by Michael Moorcock in Wizardry and Wild Romance (tho' he express an intention to explore "that area of fabulous romance whose writers invent their own Earthly histories and geographies")--but seems limiting and dismissive and--are we being too sensitive?--snooty. We're not sure her examples entirely fit within her definition. If there's a Celtic strand to HP we missed it. Chalices and dragons, yup, but Celtic inspiration? We suspect her definition is couched so as to exclude magical realism and any fantasy that can be considered "literary". Create a definition you don't like and then say you don't fit into it.

But beyond that quibble there's maybe a more interesting thought: it's speculative if it's extrapolation from what can be/has been done and sf if it's based on things which haven't been/can't yet be done. (We're tempted to shriek bifurcating bunnies at this point, and run. But, no.) This creates a moving boundary and some interesting questions. Was Nineteen Eighty-Four once sf, since the mass surveillance would have been impossibly huge and expensive (imagine the space required and power consumption of all those telescreens), or was the technology possible enough at the time for it to have gone straight into the speculative fiction category? What about The First Men In The Moon? Possibly still sf, since it's not this planet even if we've had the technologies to get there? When does Brave New World skip categories? Or has it done so already? If we can get beyond quantum teleportation, will Star Trek stop being sf? Enough of this attempted boundary drawing, we say! "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet". Every new technology might otherwise create the need for a whole new bundle of pointless reclassification.

There's something underlying all of this, perhaps the need to be seen as serious, as having a message, the hand-wringing bit. If what she describes cannot conceivably happen, then the work no longer has its purpose as a warning, and collapses into--what? mere speculation. It ceases to be a cautionary tale and presumably only exists to entertain.

Still, it's nice to know that under this possible/impossible scheme, Atwood would have classed Oryx and Crake as sf twenty years ago. Maybe, she's not so snooty after all.

We wonder about her thinking in all of this still. If Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is "always so useful in matters of the construction of alternate worlds", then she seems to be admitting of a greater freedom in envisaging a setting than the notion of this planet as opposed to out there implied when she was distinguishing between speculative fiction and sf.