In Other Worlds by Margaret Atwood

Author:Margaret Atwood [Atwood, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-385-53397-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

There are seven shorter stories in The Birthday of the World, and one that might qualify as a novella. Six of the first seven are Ekumen stories—they’re part of the “old shirt.” The seventh probably belongs there, though its author isn’t sure. The eighth is set in a different universe altogether—the generic, shared, science-fiction “future.” All but the eighth are largely concerned with—as Le Guin says—“peculiar arrangements of gender and sexuality.”

All imagined worlds must make some provision for sex, with or without black leather and tentacles, and the peculiarity of the arrangements is an old motif in science fiction: one thinks not only of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, where the genders live separately, but also of W. H. Hudson’s A Crystal Age, featuring an antlike neuter state, or John Wyndham’s Consider Her Ways, also based on a hymenoptera model, or Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, which tries for absolute gender equality. (Men breastfeed: watch for this trend.) But Le Guin takes things much further. In the first story, “Coming of Age in Karhide,” we see Gethen/Winter not through the eyes of a Mobile but through those of a Gethenian just coming into adolescence: which gender will s/he turn into first? This story is not only erotic but happy. Why not, in a world where sex is always either spectacular or of no concern whatsoever?

Things aren’t so jolly in “The Matter of Seggri,” where there’s a gender imbalance: far more women than men. The women run everything, and marry each other as life partners. The rare boy children are spoiled by the women, but as men they must live a segregated life in castles, where they dress up, show off, stage public fights, and are rented out as studs. They don’t have much fun. It’s like being trapped in the World Wrestling Federation, forever.

“Unchosen Love” and “Mountain Ways” take place on a world called O, created by Le Guin in A Fisherman of the Inland Sea. On O, you must be married to three other people but can have sex with only two of them. The quartets must consist of a Morning man and a Morning woman—who can’t have sex—and an Evening man and an Evening woman, who also can’t have sex. But the Morning man is expected to have sex with the Evening woman and also the Evening man, and the Evening woman is expected to have sex with the Morning man and also the Morning woman. Putting these quartets together is one of the problems the characters face, and keeping them straight—who’s for you, who’s taboo—is a problem for both reader and writer. Le Guin had to draw charts. As she says, “I like thinking about complex social relationships which produce and frustrate highly charged emotional relationships.”

“Solitude” is a meditative story about a world in which conviviality is deeply distrusted. Women live alone in their own houses in an “auntring” or village, where they make baskets and do gardening, and practise the non-verbal art of “being aware.

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