Margaret Atwood, writer of quality dystopias, apparently dismissed scifi as “talking squid in outer space.” Clearly, her brain has been eaten by Ursula Le Guin’s decaying corpse of genre fiction. But before you angrily stick your copy of Handmaid’s Tale where the sun don’t shine (that is, right next to the mouldering stack of Xanth books), please take a moment to contemplate the horrifying truth: Atwood is NOT WRONG.
This glorious website from scifi author Vonda McIntyre features the finest collection of “talking squid in outer space” novels, stories, and illustrations this side of the Goodwill Store. Please enjoy such treasures as the featured story and the Squidliography. If you still require more scifi squid, head over to Space Squid Zine. Or just get yourself a pet squid.
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February 5, 2008 at 9:19 pm
Thanks for the link –both to the website and to UKL’s website (love her–and can not find her books here!)
You know, in one of my articles (sneak preview) I compare Bibi Netanyahu to a giant squid.
Squids are good.
Gila
February 5, 2008 at 9:55 pm
Seeing your post reminds me that I have not read any Margaret Atwood in a long time. I have this vivid image in my mind of laughing out load at something she wrote. Was it a precarious dinner table that collapsed? It’s time I got reacquainted with her.
Tom
February 6, 2008 at 6:23 am
I like Paul McAuley’s characterization of genres as “toolkits” (in your first link). But does that mean that authors, like Cormac McCarthy and Margaret Atwood, who don’t think of themselves as “science fiction authors,” aren’t using those toolkits, and therefore aren’t writing sci-fi?
February 6, 2008 at 9:44 am
Sam - I think they ARE using the toolkits - after all, they certainly follow the classic Last Man on Earth/Brave New World tropes. (Oryx and Crake is in the scifi section in OUR house, dammit.) I just think they don’t want to play with the uncool kids on the literature block. As Le Guin says in her mocking essay linked above:
“Could he not see that Cormac McCarthy — although everything in his book (except the wonderfully blatant use of an egregiously obscure vocabulary) was remarkably similar to a great many earlier works of science fiction about men crossing the country after a holocaust — could never under any circumstances be said to be a sci fi writer, because Cormac McCarthy was a serious writer and so by definition incapable of lowering himself to commit genre?”
February 6, 2008 at 10:27 am
My question is, where does this leave authors like Jablokov? I mean, they don’t have talking squids - just talking dolphins… and killer whales speaking obtuse Elizabethan English. In space.
I guess that’s not sci-fi enough.