May 24, 2005

Oryx and Crake III

Anyone interested in Canadian literature, sf, or, particularly, Canadian sf, is no doubt aware of the periodic controversy that swells up whenever Margaret Atwood is accused of writing science fiction. Atwood is surely too well-read to believe her own statement that science fiction is about "intergalactic space travel, ... teleportation, [and] Martians." Is her demurral, then, merely a bid to enforce cultural boundaries? To retain the privileges of the "literary" as opposed to the "commercial" writer? Or is she not so much turning her back on genre fiction, as aligning herself with what she perceives as the more current trends within the genre?

To a large extent, it does not matter what she thinks.

Critics, fans, and other writers may grouse about her, but Atwood has received significant affirmation as a writer of science fiction: The Handmaid's Tale won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987 and was a finalist for the Nebula Award. So the question rebounds on sf critics, reviewers, and readers. We have, by and large, accepted Atwood into the fold, albeit kicking and screaming (both her, and us). And why have we done this? Are we taking the moral high ground with a display of magnanimity in the face of ingratitude? Or is it bare-faced literary social-climbing? And are her novels really science fiction anyway? (If they are, they are "mundane" science fiction, to use the term coined by Geoff Ryman and others to indicate science fiction "of the world.")

I am interested in questions of genre and categorization — critical categorization, and marketing —and Atwood provides an interesting case study. I tend, myself, to use the terms "sf" or "speculative fiction" rather than "science fiction," because they are more inclusive and seem better to reflect changes and expansions in the genre. But to retain such usage when discussing Atwood would only be confusing, as she has admitted to writing "speculative fiction," by which she means a text that extrapolates from present trends — we can let that sit — while denying that her texts are "science fiction." She is correct: Oryx and Crake is not science fiction. But not because it falls into the more rarified category of "speculative fiction." Rather, it is not science fiction because it fails to be so. It has many of the earmarks; it seems to signal its intent: but these are feints.

It does not present a tangible, believable future. For example, Atwood's neologisms ("wolvog" for a wolf/dog hybrid, for example, or "AnooYoo" as the name of a company that offers rejuvenation products) are frequently jarring, even awkward. Atwood may disdain Madison Ave. but surely she cannot deny that they are slicker than this. It is an astonishing thing to say of an acclaimed stylist, but in this regard, her language lacks wit. And this lack is not merely stylistic; it betokens a larger failure of vision. World-building is something that science fiction has always done, and well; her world is neither convincing in the traditional world-building sense, nor is it comparable to the kaleidoscopic, self-conscious discourses of William Gibson et al. It comes down to this: science fiction, broadly speaking, is a "macro" form: it concerns itself with big questions that are grounded in the shared material reality — physical, social, political, ecological — of this world. Atwood may personally be concerned about such questions, but her fiction usually is not; one may argue, but I think it would be fair to say that she has historically been more interested in characters. Characters in situ, but ultimately singular. Oryx and Crake is no exception. In some ways it is even more narrowly focused than other of her work. Unlike in Alias Grace, for instance, in Oryx and Crake there is only one voice, though that voice changes as the character's name and situation change. Certainly Snowman's narrative offers its own dissociative poetry, but it fails to point outwards in the way that similarly singular sf protagonists do (I am thinking here of Samuel Delaney's Dhalgren, to choose an extreme example). More egregiously, at least from a genre standpoint — and accepting the definition of science fiction as a "macro" form — Atwood's plot relies too much on the actions of individuals. This was no doubt her intent: to create characters who are impelled to disrupt the mass consensus under which they live. However, in credible contemporary science fiction — as distinguished from space opera or adventure stories — the world is neither saved, nor destroyed, by isolated hero(ine)s or mad scientists. In this novel, not only do individual actions have irreversible global consequences, but individual actions in a social vacuum. It is more a solipsistic hallucination than a call to action, no matter how many books about the ecology Atwood recommends on the McClelland and Steward Website. Oryx and Crake is more a parable and the science-fictional elements merely trappings, for, as John Clute points out, Atwood's vision of technological and cultural trends is both static and retro. In a strange twist Oryx and Crake is speculative fiction that is probably less appealing to most habitual readers of the genre, than to a more general audience. And in that sense, Atwood is positioning herself just right.

[Full disclosure: as mentioned earlier, I am going to a sf conference early next month, where I will be taking about Atwood. So any comments, unless you tell me otherwise, may be used, with full acknowledgement of course.

Oryx and Crake I
Oryx and Crake II

Cross-posted to The Valve.]

Scribbled at May 24, 2005 2:56 AM AST | Permanent link to this post | More? sf

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