Margaret Atwood and the Hierarchy of
                    Contempt1
                                 Peter Watts


   Start with a metaphor for literary respectability: a spectrum,
ranging from sullen infrared up to high-strung ultraviolet.
Literature with a capital L (all characters, no plot) sits enthroned at
the top. Genre fiction, including science fiction (all plot, no
characters) is relegated to the basement. Certain types of fantasy
hover in between, depending on subspecies: the Magic Realists get
loads of respect, for example. Tolkein gets respect. (His myriad
imitators, thank God, do not.) Down in the red-light district,
science fiction's own subspectrum runs from "soft" to "hard", and
it's generally acknowledged that the soft stuff at least leaves the
door open for something approaching Art—Lessing, Le Guin, the
New Wave stylists of the late sixties—while the hardcore types are
too caught up in chrome and circuitry to bother with character
development or actual literary technique.

  I call it The Hierarchy of Contempt, and although you might
point to exceptions at any wavelength, it seems a reasonable
approximation of the literary "credscape"—according to the current
regime at least, who hold the realist novel to be the benchmark
against which all else is judged.

  Given that realist benchmark, you might expect respectability to
correlate with real-world plausibility in the narrative itself. You
would be wrong. The same critics who roll their eyes at aliens and
warp drive don't seem to have any problems with a woman
ascending into heaven while hanging laundry in One Hundred
Years of Solitude, just so long as Gabriel Garcia Marquez doesn't
get published by Tor or Del Ray. In this sense the Hierarchy is
neither consistent nor rational; it is therefore unsurprising that
those who live by its tenets tend to develop psychological
problems.

    First published summer 2003 in On Spec 15(2): 3-5.
1
Peter Watts                       2         Hierarchy of Contempt


  Margaret Atwood, for example.

   Here is a woman so terrified of sf-cooties that she'll happily
redefine the entire genre for no other reason than to exclude herself
from it. Of her latest novel—a near-future dystopia detailing
baseline-Humanity's replacement by a genetically-engineered
daughter species—she has said: "Oryx and Crake is not science
fiction. Science fiction is when you have chemicals and rockets."
It was not an isolated slip. Atwood has also characterised science
fiction as the stuff that involves "monsters and spaceships", and
"Beam me up, Scotty".

  Atwood claims to write something entirely different:
speculative fiction, she calls it, the difference being that it is based
on rigorously-researched science, extrapolating real technological
and social trends into the future (as opposed to that escapist
nonsense about fictitious things like chemicals and rockets,
presumably). The irony, of course, is that Atwood's very
explanation as to why she doesn't write science fiction not only
places Oryx and Crake squarely in the science fiction realm, but at
the least respectable end of that realm—the hard, extrapolative
depths of the deep infrared.

  Whenever Atwood makes such remarks—she trotted out the
same horseshit for The Handmaid's Tale back in the eighties—I
suffer mixed reactions. Sheer dumbfounded awe, for one—that
this bloody tourist could blow into town and presume to lecture the
world on the geography of the ghetto, blithely contradicting
generations of real geographers who've spent their whole lives
there. It stirs something violent in me. And yet, above the gut I
just can't believe that Atwood could possibly be that stupid. She
can tell Wyndham from Gibson, she reads them both. She's
certainly not an idiot. She may not even be a liar. But I suspect
that a terrible truth lurks in the back of her mind, a dark,
commonsensical thing barely repressed by literary peer pressure
and the rearguard efforts of marketing gurus. She can feel it deep
Peter Watts                      3         Hierarchy of Contempt

in the id, gnawing towards the light; should it ever escape the very
world of OprahLit would fall, the peaceful sanctimony of its
inhabitants laid forever waste.

  Here is the unbearable truth that Margaret Atwood struggles so
heroically to deny: science fiction has become more relevant than
"Literature".

   It could hardly be otherwise. Here in the real world, people run
software with their brainwaves.          Robot dogs are passé.
Teleportation is a fact. It has become routine to genetically cross
goats with spiders, fish with tomatoes. Every week seems to
herald the arrival of some new and virulent plague. What has
stronger resonance in such a world: a story about the ramifications
of human cloning, or a memoir about growing up poor in post-
WWII Ireland?

   Atwood must know this, on some level. She knows she can't
stay relevant by ignoring world-changing events. She knows that
many of those events are rooted in science and technology, so her
fiction must deal with science. She knows, in other words, that she
has to write science fiction.

   But she just can't bring herself to admit it, and her resulting
backflips and contortions remind me of an old trope that would be
science-fictional even by Atwood's limited understanding of the
term. I'm thinking of the stereotypic malign computer from sixties
Star Trek, haplessly trying to parse James Kirk's ingenious claim
that "Everything I say is a lie". Unable to resolve the contradiction,
it sparks. It fizzes. It cries "Does not compute", its once-stentorian
voice gone all high and squeaky. Finally, in a puff of pink smoke,
it expires.

  Margaret Atwood deserves our pity. Cognitive dissonance can't
be an easy way to go.