Locating Science Fiction by Milner Andrew;

Author:Milner, Andrew;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Thomas Pynchon makes much the same point in his ‘Foreword’ to the Centennial Edition of the novel (Pynchon, 2003, xxiv). They are surely right: the ‘Appendix’ is internal to the novel, neither an author’s nor a scholarly editor’s account of how the fiction works, but rather a part of the fiction, a fictional commentary on fictional events. And, although Atwood fails to notice this, it is anticipated within the main body of the text, by a footnote in the first chapter, which assures us, again in standard English, in the third person, in the past tense, that ‘Newspeak was the official language of Oceania’ (Orwell, 1989, 5n; 1949, 7n). Atwood uses a similar device in The Handmaid’s Tale, the first of her three dystopian SF novels, which concludes with an extract from the proceedings of a ‘Symposium on Gileadean Studies’, written in some utopian future set long after the collapse of the Republic of Gilead (Atwood, 1987, 311–24). Moreover, she readily admits that Nineteen Eighty-Four provided her with a ‘direct model’ for this (Atwood, 2005, 337). If she is to be believed, then both Orwell’s ‘Appendix’ and her ‘Historical Notes’ work as framing devices, by which to blunt the force of dystopian inevitability.

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