Science Fiction and the Human Imagination (The Ellman Lectures at Emory University)

In Other Worlds is Margaret Atwood’s account of her relationship with the literary form we have come to know as “science fiction.” This relationship has been life-long, stretching from her days as a child reader in the 1940s, through her time as a graduate student at Harvard, where she worked on the Victorian ancestors of the form, and continuing as a writer and reviewer.

This book brings together her three Ellman Lectures in 2010 – “Flying Rabbits,” “Burning Bushes,” and “Dire Cartigraphies” – and also her key reviews and speculations about the form, or forms – for she also elucidates the differences – as she sees them – between “science fiction” proper, and “speculative fiction.” For all readers who have loved The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood – not to mention the mini-sci-fi tales about Lizard Men and Peach Women embedded in The Blind Assassin – In Other Worlds is a must.