At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

In Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood details an apocalyptic plague, introduces a new species of creatures that have been genetically designed to replace humanity, and the villain is a mad scientist in love. What could be more “SFF” than Oryx and Crake?

Quite a lot, according to Margaret Atwood, who prefers to describe her novel as “speculative fiction” rather than “science fiction.” In interviews promoting Oryx and Crake, Atwood explained that everything that takes place in Oryx and Crake is based on trends that we can see today, as opposed to distant planets that have an allegorical connection to our lives. Atwood is “speculating” about where our society is headed. It’s a distinction that some readers may choose to reject, but it’s an approach that adds urgency to the world that Atwood has built.

When the story opens, “Snowman,” the last human, is standing on a beach looking at now useless skyscrapers as he considers that no one anywhere can say what time it is. This is the world after the plague. However, although Snowman is the last of his kind, he is not alone. With him are the “Crakers,” a group of genetically hybrid creatures, designed to eliminate all of humanity’s flaws. The Crakers are better able to defend themselves against nature – the scorching heat, the biting bugs, and the surviving predators – than Snowman, but they are otherwise naïve about the world they find themselves in. Snowman shepherds this new species through its early years, and the Crakers use their manufactured genes to help Snowman survive the post-apocalypse.

A second storyline introduces us to the world before the plague. Today, many scientists warn that we need to curb our emissions, our wanton use of resources, and our reliance on monocultures. Atwood speculates about what will happen if we dismiss these warnings: the sun seems hotter, the weather is violent and erratic, and bacteria have evolved to the point that the wealthy live in isolated compounds that protect them from the germs that prey on the poor. Thankfully, there are also exciting new drugs like “Blysspluss,” which protects its users from sexually transmitted diseases and is also said to improve orgasms. Readers that have little patience for allegory or obtuse allusions will not have to struggle to find Atwood’s targets.

There are plenty of targets – and warnings – in Oryx and Crake, and it often feels like a call to action; however, it is not a simple screed in which a green-thumbed hero triumphs over a cigar-smoking businessman. Instead, Oryx and Crake, as the title suggests, is a love story. Our mad scientist, Crake, is in love with a former child prostitute, Oryx, who has also had a relationship with Crake’s best friend, Jimmy. Unfortunately, as fans of Margaret Atwood’s “literary” fiction already know, love is all too often a painful experience.

Oryx and Crake can also be approached as an “SF” adventure as well. One of my favorite scenes has Snowman on the run from “pigoons,” which are extremely intelligent pigs whose genetic code has been spliced with human code. Snowman has been cut off from his protective Crakers and he has to think fast if he’s going to prevent the extinction of the human race.

Oryx and Crake is a masterpiece that sits on the edge of several genres. Atwood combines the distinctive character development and wordplay that has earned her so many literary fiction accolades with the speculative premise that we associate with SFF to create an impressive story that few readers will be able to forget. Regardless of where it’s shelved, Oryx and Crake is a must read for SFF fans.

At “The Edge of the Universe,” we review authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

It is well documented that SFF readers love trilogies, prequel trilogies, tetralogies, and “cycles.” Some authors describe settings, but SFF authors “build” worlds and universes. For many SFF readers, the standard of a well-built world is whether or not it warrants a series.

In Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood tells the story of Crake, a brilliant scientist who decides to save Earth by wiping out humanity, including himself, and replacing it with a new species of beings. To say the least, Crake’s is a bold solution, but does this world deserve to be expanded?

Yes.

Except, Atwood prefers not to call it a “sequel.” Don’t call it a “prequel,” either. Year of the Flood is a companion novel. It might seem like nitpicking, but Year of the Flood takes place simultaneously with the events of Oryx and Crake through the eyes of new characters. Regardless of what you call it, Year of the Flood does a fine job of coloring in the world that Atwood sketched in Oryx and Crake. The Earth is falling apart and only God’s Gardeners seem to care.

God’s Gardeners grow their own food on rooftops, strive to live beneath the notice of governments and corporations, and they teach their children a great deal about ecology and the Bible. Many of the Gardeners, particularly the members of the leading council of Adams and Eves, are former doctors and scientists that refused to lend their expertise to corporate interests that harm the environment. In our world of “New Atheists,” it might seem unlikely for naturalists to join a cult, but in Year of the Flood, they join in droves.

Atwood is often praised for her sharp wit, which may well be at its sharpest when the Gardeners attempt to unite scientific knowledge, the dogma of the Gardeners, and Biblical stories. The Gardeners believe that God created people to be vegetarians. However, the Gardener children find it troubling that people have teeth capable of tearing meat. Consequently, the Adams and Eves look for a Biblical story or verse that can resolve this potential contradiction. Why do scientists bother with all of this? Many of the Gardeners are scientists that believe that religion survived because it offered evolutionary advantages. Consequently, the Gardeners feel that the best way to save the earth is to incorporate religious teachings into their worldview. For example, many of their saints are naturalists.

The Gardeners strive to be benevolent, but not all of their members are able to live up to the pacifist’s ideal. Eventually, Adam 7, or “Mad Adam” starts a splinter group called “MaddAddam.” These dissidents seek to break apart the infrastructure that allows corporations to destroy the environment. Among other things, MaddAddam engineers organisms that eat asphalt and car tires.

One member of this splinter group is Crake, a brilliant scientist who determines that the most efficient way to save the earth is to eliminate and replace human beings. As the Gardeners would say, Crake engineered a “waterless flood.” Moments that illustrate Crake’s motives are not the focus of Year of the Flood, but Atwood fans will enjoy tracking the interplay between the two novels.

Oryx and Crake offered allegorical warnings about how our decisions are taking humanity to hell in a hand basket, and Year of the Flood’s warnings feel just as fiery. Coffee corporations are robbing wildlife of their natural habitat. Health corporations infect their low-level employees with diseases so they can test experimental drugs on them, all the while collecting the insurance money for the treatment. The gap between the rich and the poor seems insurmountable and the rich live in isolated compounds, willfully oblivious to the suffering of the earth and the poor around them. It’s almost enough to make one want to join a cult centered on compassion, living in harmony with the earth, and rooftop gardening…

SFF fans that love a good story set in a well-built world will be pleased with Year of the Flood. Exploring the dogma of God’s Gardeners is as fun as Atwood’s ecological dystopia is shocking. Year of the Flood may not be a sequel, but I for one would certainly welcome a third novel in this … don’t call it a “trilogy.”

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

I confess to being somewhat disappointed by In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, Margaret Atwood’s collection of essays (along with a handful of fiction shorts) dealing with science fiction. She has long been a favorite author of mine, and her science fiction (or speculative fiction as she’d prefer) works are my favorites among her books: The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, the science fiction elements of The Blind Assassin. She’s also an insightful critic and a sharp non-fiction writer. So I was looking forward to seeing her thoughts on the field I’ve been reading in for so long.

The problem may have been one of expectations, therefore. I come to the collection as both an Atwood fan and a science fiction fan and it’s the latter part that may have been the issue. Someone who comes to the collection merely as an Atwood fan, one not well versed in the genre, might find this a moderately illuminating collection of essays, but I’m not sure there’s much here that a science fiction fan hasn’t already seen. Even for those relatively unfamiliar with science fiction, though, I fear the essays are a bit slight. Read more »

At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

Margaret Atwood was once, via a review of her work, once taken a bit publicly to task by Ursula K. LeGuin for not wanting her books (specifically The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood) to be labeled “science fiction,” because, LeGuin speculated, Atwood did not want to be relegated to the genre ghetto. Atwood, however, responded that it was merely a definitional issue. She preferred “speculative fiction”— which she read as fiction that really could happen but hadn’t — rather than “science fiction” — which she read as things that could not possibly happen. Eventually she and LeGuin talked it all out at a conference, determined they had different and at times overlapping definitions/interpretations, and they ended up at the pub doing lattes and whiskey chasers (OK, I made that last part up).

So to this review’s subject — The Handmaid’s Tale. Is it science fiction or speculative fiction?  Well, turns out it’s neither because Atwood has coined a new word (damn writers!); what we have in The Handmaid’s Tale is a “ustopia.” As Atwood explains in her recent collection of essays In Other Worlds, ustopia is a mash-up of dystopia and utopia because she believes each always has elements of the other embedded within it, though one might have to look hard to find it.

The Handmaid’s Tale is set in a near-future United States, part of which has been taken over by a fundamentalist totalitarian group.  Because of a plummeting birthrate for a host of societal and environmental reasons, fertile women are a rare commodity and so these “handmaids” are rounded up and divvied out to the select powerful.  The story is told from the first person POV of one of the handmaids.

So what is The Handmaid’s Tale:  science fiction, speculative fiction, dystopia, ustopia?  To be honest, I’m not all that invested in the argument. Authors are free to label (or not) their works whatever they’d like, and we readers are free to accept that or disagree, calling them “science fiction,” “literary fiction,” or “Maude” if we so choose. If I had to pick a side, on this one I’d go with Atwood. There really isn’t a lot of “science” in the fiction here: no far future, no advanced technology (a souped-up credit card system is about it), no strange creatures. Even the social system isn’t particularly unusual. In fact, Atwood is often quoted as saying she put nothing in the book that hasn’t appeared somewhere somewhen on this planet.  So no, it really in my mind doesn’t fit the science fiction label; it’s much more a thought experiment — a “what if” idea that leads to a wave of questions and answers. But in the end, it doesn’t really matter. Because what The Handmaid’s Tale is is great.

The writing is simply superb — vivid, precise, poetic in places, filled with evocative similes and metaphors, such as when she describes a set of tulips:

redder than ever, opening, no longer wine cups but chalices; thrusting themselves up to what end? They are, after all, empty. When they are old they turn themselves out, then explode slowly, the petals thrown out like shards

redder than ever, opening, no longer wine cups but chalices; thrusting themselves up to what end? They are, after all, empty. When they are old they turn themselves out, then explode slowly, the petals thrown out like shards

Beyond the sharp image itself, note the color red (specific to the handmaids), the wine and chalice (appropriate image for a book focused so much on religion), “thrusting” (appropriate for a book focused so much on sex), “”empty” (appropriate for a book where infertility is so key), “explode . . . shards” (fits not only some of the players, but also echoes the terrorism that occurs throughout the book). We get this sort of layered imagery/symbol/metaphor throughout the book, making it wonderfully rich.  Just as we see patterns layered throughout as well, such as all the ways the narrator is linked via language or image to being like or treated like a child or a doll. The short chapter dealing with the actual sexual act involving the Handmaid, her Commander, and the Commander’s Wife in its very few pages is fodder for an entire thesis examining the use of language for effect as Atwood finds all sorts of ways — word choice, image, simile, white space, sound, etc — to make this the least sexy sex scene ever presented on the page.

The structure, which alternates between three time periods adds to the sense of rich complexity as the reader moves with the narrator through the time prior to the coup, the time shortly after the coup during her handmaid “training,” and finally through present time. It also does a nice job of keeping the reader wondering about how all this happened, about what happened to the narrator’s husband, her daughter, what happened during their failed escape attempt. The answers get teased out slowly.

The narrator herself is a wonderful construction. Atwood takes a real risk by not making her heroic in the way we usually think of it. Most authors would have had their character working hard to overthrow the cruel regime. The narrator’s focus, though, is on survival.  And she is, realistically I’d say, a very passive kind of character. That isn’t to say we don’t get other sorts in here. Her friend Moira is more the stereotypical protagonist in this kind of work — the one who simply refuses to bow down. The narrator’s chief trainer, Aunt Lydia, is also a strong, active character. The same is true of the wife of the commander to whom the narrator is assigned. Both also show Atwood’s refusal to take the easy way out by making this merely a screed against men; in this world women are both oppressed and oppressor; and the women like Aunt Lydia are fervent believers in what they do. The commander, one of the higher-ups in the new government is also a believer, but things, as the book soon reveals, are a bit cloudier in that regard.

The book is chilling, moving, thought-provoking. Like all good dystopias (or ustopias), all good (dare I say it) science fiction or speculative fiction, it doesn’t present you a society to criticize for all its obvious flaws; it presents you a society that like a funhouse mirror offers up a reflection — warped sure, distorted sure — of our own and makes you see our own flaws, makes you question our own societal fixtures. If you read 1984 and criticize Big Brother, you’re missing the point. It isn’t the Big Brother in his fictional society Orwell wants you to worry about; it’s the Big Brother in our own, or potentially in our own.

And Atwood takes a page from Orwell as well at the very end of the novel, giving us in effect two endings, just as Orwell did with his Newspeak chapter at the close of 1984. And I think for the same purpose, though for spoilers’ sake I won’t go into the details.

The Handmaid’s Tale is a true modern classic and should be not just on everyone’s “to-be-read” shelf but on everyone’s “must-read” shelf.  Though perhaps Atwood would object to those labels and come up with one of her own…