Is The Handmaid’s Tale sci-fi?

It’s not marketed as such, nor does the book cover pronounce it to be so, but that’s how it was sold to me. Now that I’ve finished it, I feel like the question might be irrelevant. If The Handmaid’s Tale wanted to be science fiction, no one could contest it: despite a blatant absence of the obvious signifiers (robots, rockets, et al.), it’s squarely dystopian in a way that places it well inside sci-fi boundaries delineated by writers like Samuel Delany and Joanna Russ.

However, it clearly doesn’t have any interest in labeling itself, least of all as a sci-fi novel (incidentally, is it okay that I prefer the shortened “sci-fi” to the more commonly-used “SF”?). So…do my external judgements in this particular case matter? What does it bring to the table in terms of a discussion of an already canonized novel to call it “sci-fi”?

Atwood herself makes a pragmatic distinction between science fiction and the broader, more inclusive notion of speculative fiction, noting in her essay collection, Moving Targets, that “the science fiction label belongs on books with things in them that we can’t yet do, such as going through a wormhole in space to another universe; and speculative fiction means a work that employs the means already to hand, such as DNA identification and credit cards, and that takes place on Planet Earth.” (Less generously, she once told the BBC that science fiction was “talking squids in outer space.”) Those are reasonable criteria, but it seems to miss the point (and heart) of sci-fi, and I can’t help but think Atwood is just attempting to evade being prodded onto the dead-end road of genre fiction. As Ursula K. Le Guin pointed out in a Guardian review of Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, “she doesn’t want the literary bigots to shove her into the literary ghetto.”

Bummer, right?

While it’s not quite talking squids in outer space, The Handmaid’s Tale is certainly futuristic. It takes place in a theocratic military dictatorship, enforced with the same kind of paranoid obliqueness as Orwell’s 1984 police state (“the Eyes might be watching!”). Born as a reaction to implied decades of agricultural degradation, widespread infertility, and social unrest, the new autocratic “Republic of Gilead” monitors its citizens (particularly women) with Biblical ferocity, condemning people to death for crimes as petty as homosexuality and reading. Here, the ideological control system revolves around fertility, or a lack thereof; our titular “Handmaid” is a kind of sex slave, begrudgingly valued for her fecundity, bound to a high-ranking officer and his wife to serve as a ritual chalice for their dwindling seed. If she conceives, the child is raised by the couple and she is guaranteed safety from “unwoman” status, i.e. death. Handmaids are denied free agency and education, exchanging their “freedom to” (do as they please) for a more dubious, institutionalized “freedom from” (danger, fear).

For what it’s worth, The Handmaid’s Tale might be a perfect example of Geoff Ryman’s controversial “Mundane SF.” There’s no interstellar trade, no quantum uncertainty, no faster-than-light travel or communication with alien intelligences. It’s the future alright, but it’s a future, as Ryman says, “in which we only have ourselves and this planet.” Comparing the Mundane SF manifesto to Atwood’s own particular critique of what constitutes science fiction is pretty revealing; clearly there’s some overlap between what Atwood understands as being merely “speculative” and what Ryman calls “mundane.” That is to say, both are based in extrapolation of current social and technological events — Atwood’s Gilead is a nightmarish imagination of a post-feminist backlash by the religious right, not an impossibility for a fervent mind in 1985, when it was written (or now, even). Both, furthermore, avoid using the panacea of “science” to fill in the gaps of a future society, relying rather on thoughtful mutations of contemporary social structures. All of which suggests that the hot-button subject of Mundane SF is really nothing new.

It seems to be a bottom-up approach rather than a top-down one; instead of beginning with a general futuristic premise (like “what if Aliens lived on Earth?”) and then building the particulars of story around it, Atwood suggests we begin with the very specific, day-to-day exigencies of society — the Handmaid wears red, she does the grocery shopping — in order to cobble together a larger (and sort of hazy) image of what has happened, in the future, on a large scale. It’s a pragmatic approach, but ultimately it’s not revolutionary — just literary.

Perhaps what really defines this speculative/Mundane style (which is both conjectural and literary) is that it clearly aims to be critical, not escapist. The Handmaid’s Tale is a critical novel: of fascism, misogyny, reactionary fundamentalism, and the masculine fear of contemporary feminism. It’s critical in the same way 1984 is, or Fahrenheit 451, or any of the other great science fiction books that the literary establishment has absolved of nerdiness by calling “classic.” Is this a fair parameter? That science fiction in the traditional sense aims to escape the current world by suggesting radical alternatives, while speculative fiction aims to criticize and interpret it? Either way the final goal is the same: to find something better, be it through utopian idealism or cautionary speculation.

In a way, The Handmaid’s Tale is both. The Gileadean state is someone’s utopian dream, one in which everyone has their role, working together in humility towards the restoration of society and for God. It’s Atwood’s awareness of this — that even the most fascist of states begin with a dream — which makes it such a canny cautionary tale. And, perhaps, a very smart piece of science fiction.

This isn’t a novel, but the second volume of a contemporary annual design publication called the Task Newsletter, a project by Emmet Byrne, Alex DeArmond, and Jon Sueda. I include it here because Issue #2 is devoted to “Mundane Science Fiction,” a controversial recent sub-genre popularized and manifesto-ed by the writer Geoff Ryman. This blog (and its author) is so habitually ensconced in yellowing 60s sci-fi paperbacks that the issue of Mundane SF had somehow completed avoided its radar.

This issue of the Task Newsletter is radically designed and packed with fascinating material, including a great excerpt from the collaboratively-written new novel PHILIP (and an interview with one of its authors) as well as reprints of all the images from the Voyager Golden Record. However, it’s the first article, Mundane Science Fiction: Another Article About the Benefits of Exercise (link to full article online), by Kate McKinney Maddalena, that I’d like to take to task (so to speak).

In brief, Geoff Ryman sees canonical science fiction as being escapist, comparing it to an “adolescent desire to run away from our world.” This, in turn, provokes a dismissive mentality towards the home planet, which, coupled with fantasy for more fruitful worlds, “can encourage a wasteful attitude to the abundance that is here on Earth.” Unlike its spacefaring, forward-thinking counterpart, “mundane” sci-fi places its stories in the near future, and avoids unreasonable — or, in Ryman’s terms, “unlikely” — technology. Simply: no fantasy. The emphasis is, rather, on creatively developing solutions for the actual problems which face us on Earth. In the words of the much-attacked Mundane SF Manifesto, “the most likely future is one in which we only have ourselves and this planet.”

I agree that Ryman’s “mundane” appellation serves as a useful category for an already-existing genre of science fiction (that heady triad of postapocalyptic/utopian/dystopian, which, as Maddalena points out, already fulfills much of the tenets of Mundane SF). And I see a kind of tragic, humbling poetry in the “only us, on this planet” future. However, like many of my hard-nosed, territorial geek fellows, I buck against Ryman’s use of the word “unlikely.” According to Ryman, interstellar trade is unlikely. As is contact with extraterrestrial intelligences. And alternative universes. And faster-than-light travel (“wish fulfillment fantasies”).

Many, including Maddalena, have asked, “Unlikely to whom?”

I demand, rather: “Unlikely when?”

Are we so trapped in 2009-era Terran existence that we cannot see the longer scheme of things?

Flying in a plane is mundane — and yet it wouldn’t have seemed so to Jules Verne. Nor to H.G. Wells. On a recent flight, I gazed out the window at a magnificent vista of sky, surveying tiny points of light through a haze of sunset-silhouetted clouds. I didn’t find it difficult to imagine myself gazing out of the window of a spaceship, surveying a “mundane” landscape of planets and interstellar dust with the same impassive boredom as I reserve for the view from my window seat on Delta. The only difference between my moment and a distant future in which someone like me might be as blasé about space travel (or whatever) is simply time. A good point, raised here: if this Manifesto had existed 50 years ago, how accurate would its science fiction reflect today’s world? Often, it’s the wildest, least likely prognostications that come to pass — not that the point is to be predictive.

Science fiction’s great advantage is that it’s been the only genre to consistently work with massive time-scales. Even if a story takes place over only a few hours, the very leap from the here and now of reading and the there and when of the action can be humbling, perspective-shifting. Great thinkers like Stewart Brand encourage us to think of time as a “long now” as an ecological and social gesture in order to foster our involvement in the future, pitting our current “faster/cheaper” mindset against “slower/better” thinking; science fiction writers have been doing just that for over a century.

We feed the future with speculation just as we move towards it. And are we to assume that writers will not continue to speculate? Science fiction writers in the year 2050 will be imagining the year 3000, and so on. It’s a living, breathing tradition which interacts with the very culture it critiques just as the culture catches up with its prophecies. I can only assume that this will continue forever — if not for hundreds, maybe thousands of years, pending a complete paradigm shift in literature, which I find unlikely.

Geoff Ryman disrespects this tradition (and completely misses the point of it, I think) by only seeing a few points on the greater sci-fi timeline: the now, and the slightly later, still-corrigble now. What about the Long Now? The 10,000 years in the future in which humanity will continue to tinker with, damage, repair, and write about our planet? I like to think about myself as part of an unending chain of persons reaching millennia into the future (and the past); long-term speculation activates my role in this chain, helps me think of myself as part of the greater “We” that is humankind.