My take on Margaret Atwood's "In Other Worlds - SF and the Human Imagination"

Over the last few days I've been rearranging my bookshelves - my equivalent to rearranging the underwear drawer. I can't seem to throw out my old books either (I thought) as I rediscovered some torn and yellowed volumes from high school. My handwriting hasn't improved since then, but more disturbingly the quality of the observations in the margins hasn't shifted much either. Seems I am destined to be eternally immature, despite my best efforts to conform to an outwardly changing image.

Anyway, the old and the new are now in authorial alphabetical order under six categories - Novels, Non-fiction stuff about ideas, Plays, Poetry, Short Story Anthologies, and Memoir. A seventh category, Miscellaneous, is miscellaneous.

I mention this along with Margaret Atwood's book because I have been taking breaks in my categorising and cataloguing to read it, and in a funny kind of way, it has probably influenced how I have interpreted it.

I found the reading satisfying in the same way that I now look at my neat bookshelves and find them satisfying. Some interior designers talk about autobiographical décor, and it's good to know that our eclectic taste in household stuff now has a name to legitimise it. If the furniture is autobiographical, I'd say the books we read and keep are even more so.

In Other Worlds might similarly be seen as an autobiographical account of Margaret Atwood's relationship with Science Fiction from the time she was a child to (loosely) current times (the book was published in 2011). I found it to be enjoyably fragmentary. This fragmentary but lightly themed approach is satisfying in the same way as it is to rummage through a box of dress-ups. You can go through the box systematically, or pick and choose, or take a lucky dip in to see what you come up with. For me, given that I was in my sorting out and cataloguing mode, I enjoyed reading it systematically from front to back, and I suppose the various essays, literary critiques, observations, talks and self-disclosures about this whole sci-fi field has been edited or arranged in that particular order to provide a sense of chronology.

There are observations regarding a fairly wide range of speculative novels that have entered the author's orbit over the years - H. Rider Haggard, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Yevgeny Zamyatin, HG Wells, Winthrop, Ursula le Guin, Sherri Tepper , Kazuo Ishiguro, Bryher, and others. Some I had just handled and lingered over in my concurrent reorganising activity. Others, like that of Kazoo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go is one I haven't yet read, but now will.

When Margaret Atwood came to the Perth Writers Festival earlier this year, she sat with China Mieville to debate the finer points of the field. I gather that sometimes people get very upset over apparently competing categories - I wonder if maybe it's a mapping thing, including, but not entirely to do with territoriality, status and an idea of scarcity. Incidentally, mapping is something else that is discussed in one of the essays in the book.

If you're still not sure what Margaret Atwood's thoughts are with regard to Sci Fi, I think this book goes a long way towards giving a more rounded understanding of her perspective on the debate. More importantly it gives a sense of her long-standing love and respect for the whole field, whether it be considered high, middle or low-brow.

Five stars from me!