Book description
IN OTHER WORLDS: SF AND THE HUMAN IMAGINATION 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'. For all readers who have loved THE HANDMAID'S
TALE, ORYX AND CRAKE, and THE YEAR OF THE FLOOD - not to mention the
mini-sci-fi tales about Lizard Men and Peach Women embedded in THE BLIND
ASSASSIN - IN OTHER WORLDS is a must. Margaret Atwood is the author of
more than forty works, including fiction, poetry and critical essays,
and her books have been published in over thirty-five countries. She has
won many literary awards and prizes.
