'Aliens have taken the place of angels'

[Dave Monroe]

'Aliens have taken the place of angels'

Margaret Atwood on why we need science fiction

Friday June 17, 2005
The Guardian

Before the term "science fiction" appeared, in America
in the 1930s, during the golden age of bug-eyed
monsters and girls in brass brassieres, stories such
as HG Wells' The War of the Worlds were called
"scientific romances". In both terms - scientific
romance and science fiction - the science element is a
qualifier. The nouns are "romance" and "fiction", and
the word fiction covers a lot of ground.

If you're writing about the future and you aren't
doing forecast journalism, you'll probably be writing
something people will call either science fiction or
speculative fiction. I like to make a distinction
between science fiction proper and speculative
fiction. For me, the science fiction label belongs on
books with things in them that we can't yet do, such
as going through a wormhole in space to another
universe; and speculative fiction means a work that
employs the means already to hand, such as DNA
identification and credit cards, and that takes place
on Planet Earth. But the terms are fluid. Some use
speculative fiction as an umbrella covering science
fiction and all its hyphenated forms - science fiction
fantasy, and so forth - and others choose the reverse.

I have written two works of science fiction or, if you
prefer, speculative fiction: The Handmaid's Tale and
Oryx and Crake. Here are some of the things these
kinds of narratives can do that socially realistic
novels cannot do.

· They can explore the consequences of new and
proposed technologies in graphic ways, by showing them
as fully operational. We've always been good at
letting cats out of bags and genies out of bottles, we
just haven't been very good at putting them back in
again. These stories in their darker modes are all
versions of The Sorcerer's Apprentice: the apprentice
finds out how to make the magic salt-grinder produce
salt, but he can't turn it off.

· They can explore the nature and limits of what it
means to be human in graphic ways, by pushing the
envelope as far as it will go.

· They can explore the relationship of man to the
universe, an exploration that often takes us in the
direction of religion and can meld easily with
mythology - an exploration that can happen within the
conventions of realism only through conversations and
soliloquies.

· They can explore proposed changes in social
organisation, by showing what they might actually be
like for those living within them. Thus, the utopia
and the dystopia, which have proved over and over
again that we have a better idea about how to make
hell on earth than we do about how to make heaven. The
history of the 20th century, where a couple of
societies took a crack at utopia on a large scale and
ended up with the inferno, would bear this out. Think
of Cambodia under Pol Pot.

· They can explore the realms of the imagination by
taking us boldly where no man has gone before. Thus
the space ship, thus the inner space of the hilarious
film Fantastic Voyage, the one where Raquel Welch gets
miniaturised and shot through the blood stream in a
submarine. Thus also the cyberspace trips of William
Gibson; and thus The Matrix, Part 1 - this last, by
the way, an adventure romance with strong overtones of
Christian allegory, and therefore more closely related
to The Pilgrim's Progress than to Pride and Prejudice.

More than one commentator has mentioned that science
fiction as a form is where theological narrative went
after Paradise Lost, and this is undoubtedly true.
Supernatural creatures with wings, and burning bushes
that speak, are unlikely to be encountered in a novel
about stockbrokers, unless the stockbrokers have been
taking a few mind-altering substances, but they are
not out of place on Planet X. The form is often used
as a way of acting out the consequences of a
theological doctrine. The theological resonances in
films such as Star Wars are more than obvious.
Extraterrestrials have taken the place of angels,
demons, fairies and saints, though it must be said
that this last group is now making a comeback.

We want wisdom. We want hope. We want to be good.
Therefore we sometimes tell ourselves warning stories
that deal with the darker side of some of our other
wants. As William Blake noted long ago, the human
imagination drives the world. At first it drove only
the human world, which was once very small in
comparison to the huge and powerful natural world
around it. Now we're close to being in control of
everything except earthquakes and the weather.

But it is still the human imagination, in all its
diversity, that directs what we do with our tools.
Literature is an uttering, or outering, of the human
imagination. It lets the shadowy forms of thought and
feeling - heaven, hell, monsters, angels and all - out
into the light, where we can take a good look at them
and perhaps come to a better understanding of who we
are and what we want, and what the limits to those
wants may be. Understanding the imagination is no
longer a pastime, but a necessity; because
increasingly, if we can imagine it, we'll be able to
do it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/fridayreview/story/0%2C12102%2C1507718%2C00.html

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