Read Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 Online
Authors: Damien Broderick,Paul di Filippo
Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (3 page)
Paul Di Filippo
Providence, Rhode Island
1
Margaret Atwood
(1985)
IN 1949, GEORGE ORWELL
(the English writer Eric Blair) published
Nineteen Eighty-Four,
his devastating, technologically managed and stratified dystopia. That novel, bleak and terrible, remains a watchword for totalitarian futures, even though more than a fourth of a century has passed since the date of its imagined terror. The year after the real 1984, distinguished Canadian poet and novelist Margaret Atwood published her own scarifying dystopia. While Orwell’s Orwellian prospect seems less likely today, long after the fall of the Soviet Union, Atwood’s woman-hating Republic of Gilead is all too visible in nations such as Iran and Afghanistan (where she spent some time). Sequestered, cloaked women suffer repression by the Taliban and other theocratic regimes. In the USA, where Atwood’s imaginary Gilead springs from a harsh Christian fundamentalist conspiracy and coup d’état, political extremists really do join with science-deniers in aspirations scarily akin to Atwood’s cautionary tale.
The novel is set around the end of the 20th century; like Orwell’s, its date has already passed. Does this mean it’s no longer science fiction? (Some prefer to see it as fable, and Atwood declared it “speculative fiction,” famously dismissing sf as “talking squids in outer space” but relenting more recently.) No. Like a number of other fine sf novels discussed below,
The Handmaid’s Tale
is best read as alternative history—allohistory, uchronia—a record of a past that might have occurred had key events taken a slightly different course. Atwood does not appeal to sf’s toolkit of quantum superposed realities or Many Worlds theory to justify her fantastika, nor did Philip Roth (Entry 76), Michael Chabon (Entry 88) or several others among our 101. But it’s no accident that, as well as being shortlisted for the mainstream, Booker Prize, it won the Arthur C. Clarke, Locus, and James Tiptree, Jr. Awards for best sf novel, while selling more than a million copies to readers who always supposed they disliked sf.
What motivates Atwood’s narrative is the same fateful dynamo (“The purpose of power is power,” wrote Orwell) driving
Nineteen Eighty-Four
:
“The book is an examination of character under certain circumstances, among other things… it’s a study of power, and how it operates and how it deforms or shapes the people who are living within that kind of regime.”
[1]
Offred (“of Fred”) is 33 years old, conscripted into the Handmaid caste to bear children to powerful Commanders and their barren Wives in a nation polluted by reactor catastrophes, toxic molecules, viruses, environmental desecration. Her monthly and highly orchestrated rape is justified by phrases from the Old Testament. While her true name is never revealed, it is probably June—perhaps significantly, as an underground rebellion against this fascist state is known as Mayday, and Offred exemplifies the future of that day. The novel is her often despairing and superbly written meditations on a bitterly constrained life, torn away from her husband and child, denied identity, work, access to any materials she might use to harm her betters or kill herself.
Marthas do the scut work, Econowives tend house for the working men. Aunts at the Red Center, using drugs and harsh discipline, shape younger women like June/Offred into cowed, cowled, scarlet-clad nuns of fertility. Young men with machine guns, Angels and Guardians, patrol the Republic and monitor checkpoints. Former abortion doctors and priests are still being hunted down and hanged in public; a rapist Guardian is literally torn apart by maddened Handmaids in a ceremony recalling the Greek myth of Pentheus dismembered by Maenads.
Against this suffocating background Offred is drawn into illicit liaisons with her Commander—at first to play Scrabble, of all things, and read old forbidden magazines, but finally dolled up in whorish garb for a night in the inevitable “men’s club” where she is displayed as an “evening rental,” then set up with chauffer Nick by Wife Serena Joy, a former TV evangelist in the mold of Tammy Faye Bakker, who hopes fresh young semen will get the Handmaid pregnant and secure their social position. But these new crimes only wind the chains more tightly, bring Offred closer to ruin even as it seems she might escape to Canada via the Underground Femaleroad.
If it is a future not quite as terrible as the crazed utopia of Cambodia under Pol Pot, nor even of the Gulag, still it is unbearably, soul-crushingly bleak. In the much modified film script by Harold Pinter, Offred knifes the Commander to death and escapes with her lover Nick. Atwood’s novel is less explicit, while leaving that plot door ajar. An afterword records an academic discourse in 2195; the book we’ve just read proves to be a reconstruction from 30 old cassette tapes dictated by the Handmaid, perhaps to her daughter or the new child, following her presumptive escape to freedom. As Atwood comments, “Her little message in a bottle has gotten through to someone—which is about all we can hope, isn’t it?”
But the novel is not just a redemptive “little message,” either; it is a beautifully wrought poem of a book, filled with acute observations. Consider the irises:
bleeding hearts, so female in shape it was a surprise they’d not long since been rooted out. There is something subversive about this garden of Serena’s, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently. A Tennyson garden, heavy with scent, languid; the return of the word swoon. Light pours down upon it from the sun, true, but also heat rises, from the flowers themselves, you can feel it: like holding your hand an inch above an arm, a shoulder. It breathes, in the warmth, breathing itself in. (161)
As does this novel, in all its brutality and longing.
[1]
Mervyn Rothstein, “No Balm in Gilead for Margaret Atwood,”
New York Times,
February 17, 1986.
2
Orson Scott Card
(1985)
WHAT IS IT
about a science fiction novel that has remained more or less continuously in print for more than a quarter century, inspired legions of passionate fans and equally passionate detractors, spun off an entire universe of sequels, prequels and lateral reworkings, and became a standard part of many high-school curricula? Perhaps only by voyaging deep into its origins can a 21st century reader gain some perspective on Orson Scott Card and his
Ender’s Game
.
It is instructive to pick up the first edition of
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
(1979), attributed then only to founding editor Peter Nicholls, and note that there is no entry for Orson Scott Card. True, Card had already sold his first story in 1977 to
Analog
, but the
Encyclopedia’s
general policy was to focus on authors with book credits—although they did make exceptions for such luminaries as Robert Abernathy and Vance Aandahl.
By the second edition, from 1993, when John Clute had come onboard as co-editor, Card merits two full pages.
Plainly something had happened to boost his stature. That kickstart was, of course,
Ender’s Game
, which this later edition of the
Encyclopedia
revealed, in fact, to have as its seed Card’s very first story sale of the same name that had been ignored in 1979. In his substantial 1990 short story collection,
Maps in a Mirror,
Card records that
The novel
Ender’s Game
is the only work of mine… that was truly expanded from a short work that I had not intended to expand. Indeed, I had never expected to do anything with Ender Wiggin again…. I was beginning to work with a novel idea with the working title
Speaker of Death
…. [S]uddenly it dawned on me that the Speaker should be Ender as an adult…. [A]ll the problems would be solved if I went back and rewrote “Ender’s Game” as a novel, incorporating into it all the changes that were needed to properly set up
Speaker
.
The explosive effect of the novelized version of that
Analog
tale cannot be underestimated, on Card’s career or the genre in general. As Clute observes: prior to 1985, after some initial promise, “OSC’s career then seemed to drift.” If not for Ender and his much elaborated exploits, Card today might very well be regarded in the same ranks as Abernathy or Aandahl: a minor, respectable, forgotten craftsman.
And in the sf field at large, Card’s book contributed to the growing popularity of military sf, a subgenre with a relatively small profile circa mid-1980s; to the popularization of teen protagonists driving much of the current YA boom; to the co-opting of videogames into the sf mythos (a process also abetted by the uncannily co-emergent 1984 film
The Last Starfighter
); and to the genesis of a million fannish flame wars over perceived sexism, racism, homophobism, elitism and hyper-religiosity in
Card’s works
.
[1]
What stroke of genius propelled this book to such influential heights? It’s simple, in retrospect. Whereas most excitingly controversial novels include one or two hot-button topics at most, Card’s novel is composed of
nothing but
a half-dozen hot-button issues wrapped in a
bildungsroman
. In more or less descending order, these include:
An existential threat to the entire human race.
The nature of alien intelligence and person-hood, or, the role of “the other.”
Genocide.
Means versus ends.
The “great man” theory of history.
The limits of government and the proper role of the citizen.
The limits and nature of the educational system.
The military ethos.
The nature of sociopaths and power.
Family dynamics.
Sibling rivalry.
Schoolboy rivalry.
Not even Robert Heinlein in
Starship Troopers
, James Blish in
A Case of Conscience
or Philip José Farmer in
The Lovers
, perhaps not even Joanna Russ in
The Female Man
had packed so much argument-provoking philosophical dynamite into one novel.
Andrew “Ender” Wiggin—bearing a surname indicative perhaps of braininess under one’s “wig”—is the youngest child of three, a mere seven years old at tale’s start, with brother Peter the oldest and sister Valentine the middle one. They are all “odd johns,” quasi-mutant geniuses. Peter, the sociopath, will become a political powerhouse, the Hegemon. Valentine will shape society by her essays. But to Ender falls the greatest burden and glory. He will undergo years of brutal training at the interplanetary military outposts known as Battle School and Command School, all to elicit and mold his unique strategic genius. That genius will ultimately be arrayed against the Buggers, mankind’s implacable alien enemy who almost destroyed our species twice before.
In very sturdy, engaging and transparent prose, Card delivers a kind of
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
mated with
The Prisoner
TV show and
From Here to Eternity
. He captures with precision the eternal cruelties of schoolboy interactions, the rigors of boot camp, and the sophistications of war college. At the same time, he dissects the power-tripping that occupies nations and their governments. Ender is both innocent child and hopeful monster, the hothouse hybrid bloom of a harsh climate.
Card’s tale is remarkably proleptic in several areas, including the use of child soldiers, virtual reality, tablet computing, internet communications, and social networking sock-puppetry, as well as foretelling the collapse of the Soviet empire.
Besides the controversies outlined above, Card manages to rub other raw areas. There’s a nebulous sense of incest among the Wiggin kids—Valentine exiles herself to a colony world with beloved Ender; Peter plainly wants to dominate his sister in every physical sense. “Girls” don’t do well in Battle School since evolution is against them, and the Bugger warriors are all females under a Queen, yet also paradoxically evoke male homosexuality by their racial nickname. But perhaps most provocative of all is the assertion in Chapter 14 that love and compassion are the essential underpinnings for slaughter. This yoking of two realms generally perceived as polar opposites recalls some of the deliberate contrarian “Martian” thinking of Michael Valentine (a coincidental naming by Card?) Smith in Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.
