In Other Worlds
SF and the Human Imagination
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A marvelous collection of wide-ranging essays from the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments, exploring her lifelong relationship to science fiction—as a reader and as a writer
The ebook edition of this title contains over thirty additional, illuminating ebook-exclusive illustrations by the author
At a time when the borders between genres are increasingly porous, she maps the fertile crosscurrents of speculative and science fiction, utopias, dystopias, slipstream, and fantasy, musing on the age-old human impulse to imagine new worlds. She shares the evolution of her personal fascination with SF, from her childhood invention of a race of flying superhero rabbits to her graduate study of its Victorian antecedents to the creation of her own acclaimed novels.
Studded with appreciations of such influential writers as Marge Piercy, Ursula K. LeGuin, Kazuo Ishiguro, H. Rider Haggard, Aldous Huxley, H. G. Wells, and Jonathan Swift, In Other Worlds is as humorous and charming as it is insightful and provocative.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Atwood has a long and complex relationship with science fiction, and this mix of essays and short fiction represents her most sustained examination of the genre to date. Famously having refused the label "science fiction" for such novels as The Handmaid's Tale, she prefers to call her work "speculative fiction," though she here reveals herself to be both friendly to and well-read in genre SF. The book opens with three personal essays on her relationship with the fantastic, beginning with a delicious piece on her childhood obsession with rabbit superheroes, followed by a look at the connections between mythology and modern SF, and a useful discussion of her own work as dystopian fiction. Although there is little for scholars of the fantastic per se, these pieces do give significant insight into Atwood's formative influences. Following are 10 more tightly focused essays, on Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau, H. Rider Haggard's She, and other works. The six short stories are all minor but enjoyable satires on standard SF tropes such as alien invasion and cryogenics. This enjoyable volume, tellingly dedicated to Ursula K. Le Guin, reveals a writer with strong, often fascinating, if idiosyncratic opinions about genre SF.
