Earlier this year, when I went to an event to meet NASA astronaut Jim Dutton at my local science museum, I was the only person in attendance over twelve. Last night, when I went to see Ursula K. Le Guin and Margaret Atwood chat on stage as part of the Portland Arts and Lectures 2010 series, I felt like the only person there under forty. Alas, this is my life: the aspirations of a child and the literary interests of a middle-aged woman.

Pairing Margaret Atwood with Ursula K. Le Guin was smart: they come from similar backgrounds, both attended Radcliffe in the pre-Second Wave years, both are very prolific writers of indefinable genre fiction, and they’ve evidently been friends for years. Seated on little divans in front of over 2,000 people (yes, “only in Portland,” I know), they seemed like two old school chums swapping gossip even when they were deconstructing modern realism and debating whether or not the human race is doomed. The effect was intimate, convivial — Le Guin giggling uncontrollably, for example, when Atwood discussed how writing is like building a boudoir for the reader. Atwood making endless Twitter jokes.

Le Guin works very comfortably under the mantle of science fiction, having penned some of the classics of the genre, while Atwood waffles, preferring to stay in the mainstream literary conversation. In an often-cited Guardian review of Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, Le Guin wrote:

This arbitrarily restrictive definition [not science fiction] seems designed to protect her novels from being relegated to a genre still shunned by hidebound readers, reviewers and prize-awarders. She doesn’t want the literary bigots to shove her into the literary ghetto.

Who can blame her? I feel obliged to respect her wish, although it forces me, too, into a false position. I could talk about her new book more freely, more truly, if I could talk about it as what it is, using the lively vocabulary of modern science-fiction criticism, giving it the praise it deserves as a work of unusual cautionary imagination and satirical invention. As it is, I must restrict myself to the vocabulary and expectations suitable to a realistic novel, even if forced by those limitations into a less favourable stance.

Perhaps because of this disagreement, the two writers crept around the issue of science fiction all evening (Le Guin: “it’s just so complicated!”), preferring rather to discuss the motivations and morality of fiction-writing, until an audience member made a comment about their works falling between “literary fiction” and “science fiction.” Le Guin immediately took exception to this confluence of “literary” with “realistic,” arguing that realism is a genre like any other, and that all writing is by definition literary, except that some is better than others. It’s Le Guin’s belief — and Atwood seemed to be in cahoots — that realism is limited in terms of what it can actually discuss. The modern realistic novel, she lamented, has devolved into tales of well-off East Coast people with problems, and this form of novel can’t “bear witness” to anything but that particular condition. Both women were fierce in their conviction, however, that speculative and not-quite-real fictions have more freedom to tackle sweeping subjects unavailable to the realist.

This sparked a lively back-and-forth between Atwood and Le Guin regarding the lineage and definition of science fiction. Atwood saw it this way: you have science fiction over here, grandaddy H.G. Wells, speculative fiction over there, grandaddy Jules Verne, and fantasy off to another side, grandaddy Tennyson. At this, Le Guin — a frequent penner of fantasies — added wryly that fantasy is “the old grandmama that just keeps going.” They agreed that the key distinction between fantasy and science fiction was one of possibility: fantasy could never happen, while science fiction could.

Atwood: “What about Star Wars?”
Le Guin: “There have been really few science fiction movies. They have mostly been fantasies, with spaceships.”

It’s funny, because Atwood wrote 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.”

So perhaps the breakdown is as follows: could happen (speculative fiction), couldn’t happen yet (science fiction), could never happen at all (fantasy).

Of course, isn’t it all kind of ridiculous, since the thing we’re talking about is the future?

From the Archives:

My interview with Ursula K. Le Guin on Universe!
Space Canon review of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven
Space Canon review of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

Ed: Thanks to io9 for the repost!

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.