S is for Speculative

Margaret Atwood has written 20 novels, of which three (The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood) are science fiction. Indeed, the first— and far the best of them — won the inaugural Arthur C. Clarke award, Britain’s chief prize for books in the genre.

She has, however, long resisted any description of her work as science fiction, for which she was mildly upbraided by Ursula K. Le Guin a couple of years ago. Le Guin wrote that Atwood’s distinction between her own novels, which she maintains feature things which are possible, and may even have happened already, and SF, in which things happen that aren’t possible today, was pointless. She concluded that Atwood didn’t ‘want the literary bigots to shove her in the literary ghetto’.

This book attempts to deny that charge, to mark out the boundaries between what Atwood regards as science fiction and fantasy or ‘speculative fiction’ (her preferred term for her non-realist novels), and to describe their relation to myth, romance and other imaginative literature.