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Our Villains, Ourselves: on SF, Villainy, And... Margaret Atwood?

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Our Villains, Ourselves: on SF, Villainy, And... Margaret Atwood? 115 Our Villains, Ourselves: On SF, Villainy, and... Margaret Atwood? Greg Bechtel* favourite villains and what a closer exami- nation of those love/hate relationships may As a writer, scholar, reader, and reveal. Take me, for example. I take great fan of SF—that’s pronounced ess-eff, but pleasure in hating a long list of real-world more on that in a bit—I tend to dislike psy- villains and villainous enterprises: the Big choanalytic approaches to the speculative Banks, climate-change deniers, Stephen genres. In particular, I sometimes fnd my- Harper, Neo-conservatives, Neo-liberalism, self bridling at how psychoanalytic uses of Fox News, Sun Media, and the list goes on. the word “fantasy” can reduce the complex I also love my favourite SF villains, and I aesthetic and political mechanisms of the am not entirely immune to projecting these entire fantasy genre (a subset of ess-eff, in SF villains onto the real world. Senator Pal- my usage) to mere projections of repressed patine as George W. Bush? Sure, why not. anxieties (on the one hand) or expressions Though as a Canadian having lived through of romantic and “irrational” escapism ten years of Conservative government, I’d (on the other).1 What can I say? We folks be more prone to projecting him onto Ste- who take SF seriously on (and in) its own phen Harper. As Christopher points out, terms can get a bit testy about that sort of such projections can even be weirdly com- thing. And yet, David Christopher’s ex- forting, allowing me to imagine George amination of the Star Wars prequels—and Dubyah or Stephen Harper as far more in- their villains—does provoke me to think telligent than reality would seem to bear about just how much we love to hate our out, brilliant Dark Lords manipulating and *Greg Bechtel completed his Ph.D in contemporary Canadian fantasy, and his frst story collection, Boundary Problems, won the Alberta Book of the Year Award for trade fction and was a fnalist for the ReLit Award, the Crawford Award, and the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize. For more information, see his website at gregbechtel.ca. Scum & Villainy 116 Te Word Hoard Our Villains, Ourselves magnifying the faws of an “essentially” But wait. Slow down. Deep breath. good system (that is, liberal democracy) Some context. to achieve their own desired ends. But I don’t mean to say that Margaret I digress. Atwood is a science fctional villain. How- My long list of favourite SF villains ever, she has at times—and, I would argue, includes everyone from Darth Vader (of with some justifcation—come off as a vil- course) to Wilson Fisk (Daredevil), from lain of (and within, and towards) the sci- Severian (The Book of the New Sun) to ence fction genre. A few years back, Mar- Number One (Battlestar Galactica), from garet Atwood created a serious kerfuffe in Magneto (X-Men) to Kilgrave (Jessica SF circles. It may have started when The Jones), and from Mrs. Coulter (His Dark Handmaid’s Tale won the inaugural Arthur Materials) to… Margaret Atwood. Marga- C. Clarke award for science fction in 1987. ret Atwood? Oh yes, most defnitely. In fact, Atwood, however, claimed that the novel Margaret Atwood may be my favourite SF wasn’t science fction but speculative fc- villain of them all. I like my villains com- tion, since she “defne[d] science fction as plex, conficted, and clearly “evil” in their fction in which things happen that are not actions but never purely, entirely, or irre- possible today – that depend, for instance, deemably so. I like the way that certain mo- on advanced space travel, time travel, the ments of (potential) identifcation—when I discovery of green monsters on other plan- fnd myself almost agreeing with the vil- ets or galaxies, or which contain various lain’s perspective—can heighten the under- technologies that we have not yet devel- lying shiver of evil. And Atwood’s clearly oped” (“Writing” 102). Speculative fction, got the evil-actions part down pat. The way by contrast, was about possible worlds she used her power and ubiquity as a liter- rather than impossible ones. But things re- ary icon to march King-Kong-like2 into the ally heated up in 2003, when Atwood re- SF sandbox, gleefully kicking sand in the peatedly insisted that her new novel, Oryx face of the ninety-eight-pound nerdlings and Crake, was “a speculative fction, there who had the audacity to claim her as not a science fction proper,” because “[i] one of their own while she insisted that her t contain[ed] no intergalactic space travel, own work was “speculative fction” about no teleportation, no Martians,” and most near-future possible worlds, which could certainly no “talking squids in outer space” obviously be framed in clear contradistinc- (qtd. in Langford). tion to the impossible bug-eyed-monsters- Suffce it to say, reactions from the zap-guns-and-spaceships tropes of escap- SF community were less than positive. ist, anti-realistic “science fction.” Many believed that Atwood was merely Issue 5, 2016 Bechtel 117 protecting her brand as a “literary” writer, contemporary SF about the near future ... not wanting to scare off those of her read- [W]hat Atwood is in fact writing is sci-f ers who wouldn’t be caught dead reading about the near future as envisioned by Hol- something so lowbrow as SF. As Gary K. lywood” (“Croaked” 74).4 Wolfe put it (more charitably than many), Meanwhile and for decades, sig- “She’s not demeaning the SF market so nifcant portions of the international SF much as protecting the Atwood market” community—including and especially the (qtd. in Clute, “Croaked” 72). From an Canadian SF community—had been not SF perspective, Atwood’s strategy seemed only avoiding precisely such restrictive to play into the colloquially sharp distinc- defnitions as Atwood had single-handedly tion between “genre” and “literary” fction, imposed upon “science fction” but also whereby genre fction is lowbrow, fuffy, es- using “speculative fction” as an umbrella capist entertainment, while literary fction term to encompass a much broader range of is more serious, realistic, and sophisticated. speculative genres (including science fc- Such speculation seemed entirely plausible tion, fantasy, horror, magical realism, sur- to many SF readers and critics, especially realism, the new weird, and many more).5 given SF’s long history of perceiving it- Furthermore, within the SF community, self as a ghettoized and disrespected corner “science fction” was generally understood of the literary universe—as witnessed by to require some basis in plausible science Ursula K. Le Guin’s various essays lament- (e.g. Star Wars would not qualify), with the ing this fact3 or, in a different vein, Samuel sub-genre of “hard science fction” having Delaney’s reimagining of SF’s role as a the highest threshold of scientifc rigour. “paraliterary” form with the power to ac- Granted, these defnitions were (and are) complish what more stereotypically “lit- continually debated within the SF commu- erary” forms could not. Others, like John nity; however, whether out of ignorance or Clute, argued that Atwood was entirely malice, Atwood managed not only to get correct, in that Oryx and Crake’s clear ig- these terms’ existing usages wrong but to norance of contemporary SF made it either virtually reverse them. Thus, Atwood’s uni- very bad SF (e.g., outdated, clichéd, over- lateral redefnition of these terms seemed done, etc.) or not SF at all. Rather, as Clute not only dismissive of SF as a whole but puts it, “[b]alked by some seemingly unad- ignorant of how SF had been defning (and dressable refusal to do her homework in re-defning) itself in its creative and critical the ways the 21st century is actually being conversations for several decades. made storyable by writers who have gone The controversy came to a head to school, Atwood is of course not writing with Le Guin’s 2009 review of The Year Scum & Villainy 118 Te Word Hoard Our Villains, Ourselves of the Flood, in which she lamented that SF-centered frst-year literature classes— Atwood’s disavowal of the term “science it’s almost always an English major who fction” had forced her, out of respect for has read Atwood’s In Other Worlds—cites that disavowal, to “restrict [her]self to the Atwood’s defnition of “speculative fction” vocabulary and expectations suitable to a as an established fact rather than a disputed realistic novel, even if forced by those limi- term, a little part of me laughs silently (if tations into a less favourable stance” (“The a little bitterly) at the need to sidestep that Year” n.p.). This in turn led to a public dis- term if I want to avoid what is (in the end) cussion between the two authors in 2010, a rather silly debate. Certainly, I could give with each author explaining (among other the critical context, and the history of each things) her own usage of the term “sci- term, and so on.8 In some of my classes ence fction.”6 By Atwood’s later account, (those focussed specifcally on histories this seems to be the frst time she discov- of SF and SF criticism), I do. But most of ered that the two of them espoused entirely the time, that’s not the main thing I’m try- differing defnitions, such that “what [Le ing to teach, and it’s not something I care Guin] means by ‘science fction’ is specu- about all that much.
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