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!

In his essay Man, Android and Machine, Philip K. Dick expounds at length on a vintage neurological point, the so-called “appositional mind” (what we now call the left and right brains). Dick loved the idea of a mind divided into two bilateral, distinct identities: one concerned with reason, and one devoid of it. What most thought of as the unconscious, Dick believed, was in fact a different consciousness, one that we don’t wholly trust or understand. Dick writes, “it is this other mind or consciousness which dreams us at night — we are its audience as it binds us in its story telling; we are little children spellbound..”

A “consciousness which dreams us at night:” a fair one-liner about Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe Of Heaven if I ever saw one. And, of course, it is: Dick follows this last statement with the note, “…which is why Lathe of Heaven may represent one of the basic great books of our civilization.”

In brief: its protagonist is a man whose dreams can change reality. Occasionally, troubled, he sleeps, has what he terms an “effective” dream, and, when he wakes up, finds that something in the world has changed. Not changed overnight, mind you: in the morning, the new thing, the changed thing, has always been that way. The only person who remembers how things were before is the dreamer himself, who increasingly finds himself floating along the tracks of endless parallel realities, bumping into invisible corners.

The dreams dream the dreamer, dream the world, in and out of existence. Maybe Dick loved The Lathe Of Heaven because he saw his own obsessive personal tics worked throughout it; the critic and Dick biographer Lawrence Sutin calls the book “markedly influenced” by Dick’s sixties work. I think that sells this novel short. It’s a wholly original work, and it’s very Le Guin, too: her books are dominated by themes of adversity-morality, of right choices being made in the face of formidable uncertainty and darkness. This is no exception. Her “dreamer” could remake the world in his image, but instead he feels immense culpability for his power, and guilt. In the dreams, reality melts into a mutable nothingness, a complete darkness, and the dreamer must force it back to existence, a tremendous effort of will just to see the sun rise safely each morning. Which it does, but only barely.

Images taken from the 1980 television adaptation of Lathe of Heaven.

The book addresses one question more than any other: “What is reality?” This was another favorite question of Dick’s, who defined reality as that which doesn’t go away when you stop thinking about it. Which is to say, real reality is objective — it doesn’t matter whether or not you’re interfacing with it. The world exists, and will continue to exist, regardless of you. A room doesn’t blink out of being when you close the door. But what about a situation where reality itself is dreamt into existence? Is that the opposite, a subjective reality? Not exactly, not when the dreams in question concretely mold the world and everyone else in it — not when the dreams continue to exist after you stop dreaming them, and exist for others. It’s a new model: a subjective-objective reality, a conscious-unconscious, a dual real.

This is the triumph of The Lathe of Heaven, that it takes place on these variegated levels of the fuzzy real. The difficult reality of the dreamer’s world is not that it exists, but that it changes. He is not entirely sure, at first, if it actually does — or if he is going mad. It isn’t until his psychiatrist hypnotizes him into a dream-state, dictates to him a dream scenario, then suddenly sees, as a third person, one physical reality dissolve into another, that the power is proven to be “real.” That is to say, that it exists for another person, which is perhaps another definition of reality: that which exists for others as well as yourself.

On a related note, read my interview with the grand dame of science fiction herself here.