Atwood's "Wonder Tale": Old Boundaries and New Encounters

Abstract

As a genre, SF has come to ambiguously represent diverse classifications and distinctions including, but not limited to, scientification, science fiction, speculative fiction, and crossovers into fantasy. In her work, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, Margaret Atwood explains how “bendiness of terminology, literary gene-swapping, and inter-genre visiting has been going on in the SF world - loosely defined - for some time.” Interdisciplinarity is inherent within the genre, thus enabling a vast exploration of “those imagined other worlds located somewhere apart from our everyday one: in another time, in another dimension, through a doorway into the spirit world, or on the other side of the threshold that divides the known from the unknown” and “all of them might be placed under the same large ‘wonder tale’ umbrella” (Atwood). Interdisciplinarity can also be extrapolated beyond the genre. The “wonder tale” serves as a critical location wherein experimental socio-political dream work can be hypothesized and realized within fiction and beyond the limits of the social and biological sciences. In particular, an examination of the increasing effects of globalism as it relates to the environment, science, and technology can be stretched beyond what we may currently envision and/or experience in our world. Atwood’s novel, Oryx and Crake, confronts the consequences of increased corporatization in a globalized market such as genetic modification, decreased biodiversity, and the effects of global warming over transnational boundaries. This grand hypothetical, framed by an understanding of David Held and Anthony McGrew’s concepts of globalism, encourages readers to draw conclusions surrounding the present reality of “societies becoming increasingly enmeshed in worldwide systems and networks of interaction” as the “constraints of social time and geographical space” present increasingly complex socio-cultural encounters and interactions across transnational boundaries thus shifting the way we understand our world economically, culturally, and politically.