In Other Worlds - Margaret Atwood

Title: In Other Worlds – SF And The Human Imagination

Author: Margaret Atwood

Publisher: Virago             

Publish date: 2011

ISBN: 9781844087112

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Being neither fiction nor poetry, but a collection of essays and lectures, I feel out of place reviewing this but hey, it’s a book and I’m a reader. The collection explores Atwood’s lifelong obsession with Sci Fi and its influence on her writing.

As you can imagine, the prose does not disappoint. Quirky, imaginative, witty, incisive… All the Atwood usuals. But as far as readability goes, it’s abysmal. The book reminds me of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, a tome where this brilliant and restless mind shares with readers what books and influences went into the shaping of just such a mind. Theoretically it should be fascinating. But by its nature, it’s fragmented. Reading both the Biographia and In Other Worlds I feel I’m in a continual movie-time travel sequence, flashing from one point to another amidst jagged spurts of lightning. One sentence jumps from the next in tangential acrobatics, leaving you either agreeing, disagreeing or baffled, but without any holdfast or continuation. It’s like wandering about in an endlessly extended and built-upon castle complex without any idea which room you’re coming to next, where you’ve left and certainly not anything about where you’re going to come out at the end. Ok, supposedly, things are grouped into sections. There’s even an introduction (by Atwood), pointing out the organization. This raises alarm bells in the first instance, and turns out they’re justified. If you need an introduction to explain something, the explanation’s obviously not there in the text.

However, if you are game to follow through, go for it. More than enough food for thought for an evening in a quarter of a paragraph. It would be a good book for fans to acquire, and perhaps dip into a few pages at a time and mull over. Borrowing it from the library and chewing through in a few days as I did isn’t the best approach. If Sci Fi is your genre, it should probably be almost compulsory reading, just for the necessary discussions on what the genre is and isn’t (not that it comes to any conclusions or dogmatic precepts).

Alas, for readability per se, a mere one moose hoof up out of five. (Sniff.) For brilliance and potential inspiration and sheer insanity – such as leaping in one bound from Zeus to Wonder Woman’s belt -  and suggesting an overwhelming wealth of reading material and literary and cultural connections, five moose hoofs up out of five. You’ve got to want the insanity and brilliance to want to read it.