In Other Worlds
Margaret Atwood
In Other Worlds
This is Margaret Atwood's account of her relationship with the literary form we have come to know as 'science fiction'. This relationship has been lifelong, stretching from her days as a child reader in the 1940s, through her time as a graduate student at Harvard, where she worked on the Victorian ancestors of the form, and continuing as a writer and reviewer. This book brings together her three Ellman Lectures on 2010 — 'Flying Rabbits', which begins with Atwood's early rabbit superhero creations, and goes on to speculate about masks, capes, weakling alter egos, and Things with Wings; 'Burning Bushes', which follows her into Victorian otherlands and beyond; and 'Dire Cartographies', which investigates Ustopias -Utopia/Dystopia — including her own ventures into those constructions. In Other Worlds also reprints some of Atwood's key reviews and speculations about the form, or forms — for she also elucidates the differences — as she sees them — between 'science fiction' proper, and 'speculative fiction', not to mention 'sword and sorcery/fantasy' and 'slipstream fiction'.
2.7 out of 5 based on 3 reviews
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Omniscore:
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| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
Literary Studies & Criticism |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
272 |
| RRP |
£17.99 |
| Date of Publication |
October 2011 |
| ISBN |
978-1844087112 |
| Publisher |
Virago |
| |
This is Margaret Atwood's account of her relationship with the literary form we have come to know as 'science fiction'. This relationship has been lifelong, stretching from her days as a child reader in the 1940s, through her time as a graduate student at Harvard, where she worked on the Victorian ancestors of the form, and continuing as a writer and reviewer. This book brings together her three Ellman Lectures on 2010 — 'Flying Rabbits', which begins with Atwood's early rabbit superhero creations, and goes on to speculate about masks, capes, weakling alter egos, and Things with Wings; 'Burning Bushes', which follows her into Victorian otherlands and beyond; and 'Dire Cartographies', which investigates Ustopias -Utopia/Dystopia — including her own ventures into those constructions. In Other Worlds also reprints some of Atwood's key reviews and speculations about the form, or forms — for she also elucidates the differences — as she sees them — between 'science fiction' proper, and 'speculative fiction', not to mention 'sword and sorcery/fantasy' and 'slipstream fiction'.
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Reviews
The Financial Times
James Lovegrove
"What emerges from In Other Worlds is Atwood’s continued reluctance to don the mantle of SF author, even though there is seemingly no shame in joining the ranks of such illustrious forebears as Orwell, Huxley, Wells and Swift. For all that, she still revels in all aspects of the genre, both high- and low-brow, and her enthusiasm and level of intellectual engagement are second to none."
12/11/2011
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The Sunday Times
Edmund Gordon
"For such a gifted and experienced author, Atwood comes up with some ugly phrases: “nomenclatural allegiances”; “myth systems”; “utopia-facilitating”; “quinkdom”. She has a warm and energetic style, but her terminology is all over the place (at times she seems to draw distinctions between “science fiction”, “speculative fiction” and “fantasy”, then at other times to use them interchangeably), and her arguments are often loose and superficial. The five short stories with which this book concludes are by far the most enlivening things in it."
30/10/2011
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The Sunday Telegraph
Paul Kincaid
"The problem is that this is a book that means well towards sci-fi; Atwood wants to take it seriously, and wants her readers to take it seriously, yet she can never quite conquer her own ambivalence towards the genre."
19/11/2011
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