'Aliens have taken the place of angels'

[David Casseres]

That's a very good article, thanks for posting it.

She mentions William Gibson in passing, so here's a word or two about
his last two books, All Tomorrow's Parties and Pattern Recognition.

He turned a corner with All Tomorrow's Parties.  Although it's the
last part of a trilogy set in the near future and involving
cybernetics, which reads as both science fiction and speculative
fiction using Atwood's definitions, ATP itself does not read as genre
fiction at all.  Not to me, anyway.  It left me intensely curious as
to what he'd do next.

Pattern Recognition does not disappoint.  It takes place in the
immediate present and technology is incidental.  Its themes include
the struggle between art and manufactured taste, and alienation, and
somehow, in the background, the September 11 attack in New York.  I
think your average Pynchon reader would enjoy it.

David


On 7/19/05, Dave Monroe <monropolitan at yahoo.com> wrote:
> '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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