The Handmaid's Tale: Three Literary Perspectives

This week I got to attend another excellent talk hosted by One Book One Northwestern: a panel discussion on the history and ongoing importance of Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. The panelists:

• Linda Bubon: co-founder of Women & Children First, the fantastic feminism-forward bookshop in Andersonville
• Juan Martinez: fiction writer, literature & writing professor at Northwestern
• Kasey Evans: critic, English professor at Northwestern

A very nice, insightful talk. Brief notes below:

Teresa Woodruff @ Northwestern: "History, Context, and Relevance of Reproductive Dystopias"

More One Book, One Northwestern programming, inspired by Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale! Last week, I got to catch reproductive scientist Teresa K. Woodruff, Ph.D., exploring some contemporary themes and issues through the lens of Atwood's novel. Very brief notes below:

• Talks about being inspired by the hatching-chickens exhibit at the Museum of Science & Industry, later inventing tools to measure egg thickness as part of a science fair project.
• Warns against assuming that reproductive technology tends towards dystopia.
• Woodruff was one of the discoverers of the "zinc spark" that occurs at egg fertilization, an important new tool for evaluating viability in IVF.
• Woodruff's talk framed around 3 selections from Handmaid:
• The established order can vanish overnight.
• Atwood insisted that technology in the book had to be currently available. (Part of why Atwood considered herself "not a science fiction writer", at least for a while there.)
  Quote from the novel's coda, with men mocking an educated women.
  

Yes, The Handmaid's Tale is Science Fiction (and that's okay)

Recently, Damien Walter published an article entitled "No, The Handmaid's Tale is Not Science Fiction".

While I have reservations about doing a targeted op-ed response like this, I found the article really troubling on a few levels. It probably wouldn't have got under my skin if it weren't for the fact that Atwood herself has a history of saying weirdly dismissive things about the genre she often seems to be writing in—for a quick intro if you're unfamiliar, I'd suggest Lauren Davis's overview of Le Guin's take Atwood's genre status, or Cecilia Mancuso's article on Atwood and how "speculative" differs from "science" fiction.

I should say, going into this, that first and foremost I really enjoy The Handmaid's Tale (and much of Atwood's work); it's an important novel, and one that's on a lot of people's radar right now as it heads to a television adaptation at a time when women's health and reproductive rights are under attack. It's a good novel, and it's a science fiction novel, though not always shelved as such.

Where things are shelved is not, in this case at least, such a big deal, but there are aspects to the "not science fiction" argument, especially as presented here by Walter, that really bug me.

Weird & Wonderful: "Oryx & Crake" (and "The Sparrow", actually)

Small meeting last night, but we had a good discussion--discussions plural, really. Paul & I had both missed last month's meetings on Mary Doria Russell's "The Sparrow" (1996), and wanted to talk about it--Conrad wanted to chew on it some more, also. So that was good! Then we turned our attention to Margaret Atwood's "Oryx & Crake" (2003) as well. Spoilers below!