In her introduction to In Other Worlds, Margaret Atwood writes about a review of her 2009 novel, The Year of the Flood, in which Ursula K. Le Guin raised the longstanding accusation that Atwood rejects descriptions of certain of her novels as "science fiction" because she wants to be taken seriously by the literary establishment. Not so, Atwood protests: stories like Oryx and Crake or The Handmaid's Tale aren't science fiction because they describe "things that really could happen but just hadn't completely happened when the authors wrote the books" rather than thoroughly impossible events.
Despite her demurrals over writing science fiction, however, Atwood does lay claim to a "lifelong relationship with [the] literary form," and the essays of In Other Worlds explore that relationship in various ways. The first section, based on university lectures she gave in 2010, is broadly theoretical; she proposes, for example, that maybe we set stories in outer space because we've been through all the unknown regions of this world. Then there's a set of book reviews and essays that range in subject matter from the anthropological underpinnings of Le Guin's fiction to the origins of the mad scientist archetype in Gulliver's Travels, followed by examples of Atwood's efforts at writing science fiction in miniature.
Atwood's scattered impressions are interesting, and if all In Other Worlds does is lead a few readers to track down Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time or discover the joys of unabridged Jonathan Swift or to set folks straight on how The Handmaid's Tale fits into the dystopian tradition of Orwell and Huxley, that's no small feat. --Ron Hogan, founder of Beatrice.com