In Other Worlds Part 1

In other worlds : SF and the human imagination.

Margaret Atwood.

Introduction.

I'm a fifty-three-year-old writer who can remember being a ten-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an eighty-year-old writer.

OCTAVIA BUTLER.

Steel and Dotty (War in Mischiefland) by Margaret Atwood:.

In Other Worlds is not a catalogue of science fiction, a grand theory about it, or a literary history of it. It is not a treatise, it is not definitive, it is not exhaustive, it is not canonical. It is not the work of a practising academic or an official guardian of a body of knowledge. Rather it is an exploration of my own lifelong relationship with a literary form, or forms, or subforms, both as reader and as writer.

I say "lifelong," for among the first things I wrote as a child might well merit the initials SF. Like a great many children before and since, I was an inventor of other worlds. Mine were rudimentary, as such worlds are when you're six or seven or eight, but they were emphatically not of this here-and-now Earth, which seems to be one of the salient features of SF. I wasn't much interested in d.i.c.k and Jane: the creepily ultra-normal characters did not convince me. Saturn was more my speed, and other realms even more outlandish. Several-headed man-eating marine life seemed more likely to me, somehow, than Spot and Puff.

Our earliest loves, like revenants, have a way of coming back in other forms; or, to paraphrase Wordsworth, the child is mother to the woman. To date-as what I am pleased to think of as an adult-I have written three full-length fictions that n.o.body would ever cla.s.s as sociological realism: The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood. Are these books "science fiction"? I am often asked. Though sometimes I am not asked, but told: I am a silly nit or a sn.o.b or a genre traitor for dodging the term because these books are as much "science fiction" as Nineteen Eighty-Four is, whatever I might say. But is Nineteen Eighty-Four as much "science fiction" as The Martian Chronicles? I might reply. I would answer not, and therein lies the distinction.

Much depends on your nomenclatural allegiances, or else on your system of literary taxonomy. Back in 2008, I was talking to a much younger person about "science fiction." I'd been asked by the magazine New Scientist to answer the question "Is science fiction going out of date?" But then I realized that I couldn't make a stab at the answer because I didn't really grasp what the term science fiction meant anymore. Is this term a corral with real fences that separate what is clearly "science fiction" from what is not, or is it merely a shelving aid, there to help workers in bookstores place the book in a semi-accurate or at least lucrative way? If you put skin-tight black or silver clothing on a book cover along with some jetlike flames and/or colourful planets, does that make the work "science fiction"? What about dragons and manticores, or backgrounds that contain volcanoes or atomic clouds, or plants with tentacles, or landscapes reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch? Does there have to be any actual science in such a book, or is the skin-tight clothing enough? These seemed to me to be open questions.

This much younger person-let's call him Randy, which was in fact his name-did not have a hard and fast definition of "science fiction," but he knew it when he saw it, kind of. As I told New Scientist, "For Randy-and I think he's representative-sci-fi does include other planets, which may or may not have dragons on them. It includes the wildly paranormal-not your aunt table-tilting or things going creak, but shape-shifters and people with red eyeb.a.l.l.s and no pupils, and Things taking over your body." Here I myself would include such items as Body s.n.a.t.c.hers-if of extraterrestrial rather than folkloric provenance-and Pod People, and heads growing out of your armpits, though I'd exclude common and garden-variety devils, and demonic possession, and also vampires and werewolves, which have literary ancestries and categories all their own.

As I reported in my New Scientist article, for Randy sci-fi includes, as a matter of course, s.p.a.ceships, and Mad Scientists, and Experiments Gone Awfully Wrong. Plain ordinary horror doesn't count-chainsaw murderers and such. Randy and I agreed that you might meet one of those walking along the street. It's what you definitely would not meet walking along the street that makes the grade. Randy judged such books in part by the s.p.a.ce-scapes and leathery or silvery outfits on their covers, which means that my speculations about jacket images are not entirely irrelevant. As one friend's child put it: "Looks like milk, tastes like milk-it IS milk!" Thus: looks like science fiction, has the tastes of science fiction-it IS science fiction!

Or more or less. Or kind of. For covers can be misleading. The earliest ma.s.s-market paperbacks of my first two novels, The Edible Woman and Surfacing, had pink covers with gold scrollwork designs on them and oval frames with a man's head and a woman's head silhouetted inside, just like valentines. How many readers picked these books up, hoping to find a Harlequin Romance or reasonable facsimile, only to throw them down in tears because there are no weddings at the ends?

Then there was the case of the former Soviet Union. No sooner did the Wall come down in 1989 than p.o.r.nography flooded across the one-time divide. p.o.r.n had hitherto been excluded in favour of endless editions of the cla.s.sics and other supposed-to-be-good-for-you works, but forbidden fruit excites desire, and everyone had already read Tolstoy, a lot. Suddenly the publishers of serious literature were hard-pressed. Thus it was that The Robber Bride appeared in a number of Soviet-bloc countries with covers that might be described as-at best-deceptive and-at worst-as a Eurotrash s.l.u.tfest in flagrante. How many men in raincoats purchased the Robber Bride edition sporting a black-satin-sheathed Zenia with colossal t.i.ts, hoping for a warm one-handed time in a back corner, only to heave it into the bin with a strangled Foiled Again! curse? For the Zenia in my book performs what we can only a.s.sume is her s.e.xual witchery offstage.

Having thus misled readers twice-inadvertently-by dint of book covers and the genre categories implied by them, I would rather not do it again. I would like to have s.p.a.ce creatures inside the books on offer at my word-wares booth, and I would if I could: they were, after all, my first childhood love. But, being unable to produce them, I don't want to lead the reader on, thus generating a frantic search within the pages-Where are the Lizard Men of Xenor?-that can only end in disappointment.

My desire to explore my relationship with the SF world, or worlds, has a proximate cause. In 2009, I published The Year of the Flood, the second work of fiction in a series exploring another kind of "other world"-our own planet in a future. (I carefully say a future rather than the future because the future is an unknown: from the moment now, an infinite number of roads lead away to "the future," each heading in a different direction.) The Year of the Flood was reviewed, along with its sibling, Oryx and Crake, by one of the reigning monarchs of the SF and Fantasy forms, Ursula K. Le Guin. Her 2009 Guardian article began with a paragraph that has caused a certain amount of uproar in the skin-tight clothing and other-planetary communities-so much so that scarcely a question period goes by at my public readings without someone asking, usually in injured tones, why I have forsworn the term science fiction, as if I've sold my children to the salt mines.

Here are Le Guin's uproar-causing sentences: To my mind, The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake and now The Year of the Flood all exemplify one of the things science fiction does, which is to extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near-future that's half prediction, half satire. But Margaret Atwood doesn't want any of her books to be called science fiction. In her recent, brilliant essay collection, Moving Targets, she says that everything that happens in her novels is possible and may even have already happened, so they can't be science fiction, which is "fiction in which things happen that are not possible today." This arbitrarily restrictive definition seems designed to protect her novels from being relegated to a genre still shunned by hidebound readers, reviewers and prize-awarders. She doesn't want the literary bigots to shove her into the literary ghetto.

The motive imputed to me is not in fact my actual motive for requesting separate names. (If winning prizes were topmost on my list, and if writing such books would guarantee non-wins, my obvious move would be just to avoid writing them.) What I mean by "science fiction" is those books that descend from H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, which treats of an invasion by tentacled, blood-sucking Martians shot to Earth in metal canisters-things that could not possibly happen-whereas, for me, "speculative fiction" means plots that descend from Jules Verne's books about submarines and balloon travel and such-things that really could happen but just hadn't completely happened when the authors wrote the books. I would place my own books in this second category: no Martians. Not because I don't like Martians, I hasten to add: they just don't fall within my skill set. Any seriously intended Martian by me would be a very clumsy Martian indeed.

In a public discussion with Ursula Le Guin in the fall of 2010, however, I found that what she means by "science fiction" is speculative fiction about things that really could happen, whereas things that really could not happen she cla.s.sifies under "fantasy." Thus, for her-as for me-dragons would belong in fantasy, as would, I suppose, the film Star Wars and most of the TV series Star Trek. Mary Sh.e.l.ley's Frankenstein might squeeze into Le Guin's "science fiction" because its author had grounds for believing that electricity actually might be able to reanimate dead flesh. And The War of the Worlds? Since people thought at the time that intelligent beings might live on Mars, and since s.p.a.ce travel was believed to be possible in the imaginable future, this book might have to be filed under Le Guin's "science fiction." Or parts of it might. In short, what Le Guin means by "science fiction" is what I mean by "speculative fiction," and what she means by "fantasy" would include some of what I mean by "science fiction." So that clears it all up, more or less. When it comes to genres, the borders are increasingly undefended, and things slip back and forth across them with insouciance.

Bendiness of terminology, literary gene-swapping, and intergenre visiting has been going on in the SF world-loosely defined-for some time. For instance, in a 1989 essay called "Slipstream," veteran SF author Bruce Sterling deplored the then-current state of science fiction and ticked off its writers and publishers for having turned it into a mere "category"-a "self-perpetuating commercial power-structure, which happens to be in possession of a traditional national territory: a portion of bookstore rack s.p.a.ce." A "category," says Sterling, is distinct from a "genre," which is "a spectrum of work united by an inner ident.i.ty, a coherent aesthetic, a set of conceptual guidelines, an ideology if you will."

Sterling defines his term slipstream-so named, I suppose, because it is seen as making use of the air currents created by science fiction proper-in this way: ... I want to describe what seems to me to be a new, emergent "genre," which has not yet become a "category." This genre is not "category" SF; it is not even "genre" SF. Instead, it is a contemporary kind of writing which has set its face against consensus reality. It is fantastic, surreal sometimes, speculative on occasion, but not rigorously so. It does not aim to provoke a "sense of wonder" or to systematically extrapolate in the manner of cla.s.sic science fiction. Instead, this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the late twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility.

His proposed list of slipstream fictions covers an astonishing amount of ground, with works by a wide a.s.sortment of people, many of them considered to be "serious" authors-from Kathy Acker and Martin Amis to Salman Rushdie, Jose Saramago, and Kurt Vonnegut. What they have in common is that the kinds of events they recount are unlikely to have actually taken place. In an earlier era, these "slipstream" books might all have been filed under the heading of "traveller's yarn"-stories like, for example, Herodotus's accounts of monopods and giant ants or medieval legends about unicorns, dragons, and mermaids. Later they might have turned up in other collections of the marvellous and uncanny, such as Des Knaben Wunderhorn, or-even later-the kind of You-won't-believe-this-hair-raiser to be found in a.s.sortments by M. R. James or H. P. Lovecraft or-occasionally-R. L. Stevenson.

But surely all draw from the same deep well: 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. Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Sword and Sorcery Fantasy, and Slipstream Fiction: all of them might be placed under the same large "wonder tale" umbrella.

This book is arranged in three parts. The first part, "In Other Worlds," is a personal history of sorts. Its three chapters have as their genesis the Ellman Lectures I delivered at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, in the fall of 2010. The first chapter, "Flying Rabbits," explores my involvement with SF and superheroes as a child, with some thoughts on the deep origins of such superhero features as body-hugging outfits, otherworldly origins, double ident.i.ties, and flying. The second chapter, "Burning Bushes," is concerned with my undergraduate interest in ancient mythologies, which both pre-date and inform SF. It then goes on to speculate on the differences between realistic fictions and the other kinds, and on the positive and negative capabilities of each.

The third chapter, "Dire Cartographies," is partly about my unfinished Ph.D. thesis, which was about a number of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fictions I collected together under the label "The Metaphysical Romance." What intrigued me about the books I was studying were the supernatural female figures in them, the realms these inhabited, and the Wordsworthian/Darwinian split in the visions of nature they represented. These explorations led me to utopias and dystopias, of which the Victorian non-realists and those who continued to write in their traditions were very fond. "Dire Cartographies" is thus also about the three novels I myself have so far written that might be viewed as a continuation of these literary traditions.

The second part, "Other Deliberations," gathers together some of my many pieces of writing about specific works of SF over the years. Some are reviews, some are introductions, others were originally radio talks. Why did I choose these particular works of SF to write about? you may wonder. But I didn't choose them, exactly: in each case, someone else asked me to write about them, and I was unable to resist.

The third part, "Five Tributes," is a group of my own mini-SF pieces. These were selected from among the many such that I have written over the decades, and each draws on recognizable memes from the genre. Four are self-contained miniatures, but the last one-"The Peach Women of Aa'A"-is from my novel The Blind a.s.sa.s.sin, one of whose main characters is a writer of pulp-magazine science fiction during the early years of what is referred to as the golden age.

So that is what this book is about. It's about my somewhat tangled personal history with SF, first as a child, then as an adolescent, then as a one-time student and academic, then as a reviewer and commentator, and then, finally, as a composer.

But where does all of this come from-the reading, the writing, the engagement, and especially the wilder storms on the wilder seas of invention? Everyone wants to know this about writers: What is your inspiration, what put you up to it? They're never satisfied with such explanations as "Because it was there" or "I don't know what came over me." They want specifics.

So let me try this: As a young child, living briefly in the winter of 19445 in an old house in Sault Ste. Marie, I used to get up before anyone else was awake and climb to the cold but s.p.a.cious attic, where in a state of solipsistic bliss I would build strange habitations and quasi-people with a bunch of sticks and spools called Tinkertoy. What I really wanted to make was the windmill pictured on the box, but my set didn't have the necessary parts, and as it was wartime I was unlikely ever to possess the missing items.

Some say that the art one makes as an adult supplies the absence of things longed for in childhood. I don't know whether or not this is true. If I'd been able to create that windmill, would I have become a writer? Would I have become a writer of SF? We'll never know the answer to that question, but it's one theory.

Meanwhile-in gravely altered form-here is the windmill. I hope you have as much fun with it as I have had.

NOTES.

1. The quotation by Octavia Butler appears in the About the Author note at the back of her novel Parable of the Sower.

2. d.i.c.k and Jane was a school reader series of the 1940s.

3. The New Scientist article appeared in the November 18, 2008, issue, under the general heading "The future of a genre."

4. "The Wall" is the Berlin Wall.

5. The Lizard Men of Xenor appear in my novel The Blind a.s.sa.s.sin, in the chapter of that name.

6. Ursula K. Le Guin's review appears in the Guardian, August 29, 2009.

7. The public discussion with Ursula Le Guin took place in Portland, Oregon, on September 23, 2010, as part of the Portland Arts and Lectures series.

8. Bruce Sterling's essay "Slipstream" was originally published in SF Eye #5, July 1989.

9. Des Knaben Wunderhorn was a collection of German folkloric material published between 1805 and 1808.

10. Tinkertoy was a pre-Lego a.s.sembly set.

Paper puppets by Margaret Atwood: Animals of Neptune by Harold L. Atwood:.

Flying Rabbits:.

Denizens.

of Distant s.p.a.ces.

The child was already in the air, buoyed on his wings, which he did not flap to and fro as a bird does, but which were elevated over his head, and seemed to bear him steadily aloft without effort of his own.

EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON, The Coming Race.

I have spoken of the shaman and the folktale hero, of privation that is transformed into lightness and makes possible a flight into a realm where every need is magically fulfilled.

ITALO CALVINO, "Lightness," Six Memos for the New Millennium That which we do not bring to consciousness appears in our lives as fate.

C. G. JUNG.

Flying Rabbits (in balloons) by Margaret Atwood: I entered the sort of modern wonder-tale world we might generally label SF at an early age. I grew up largely in the north woods of Canada, where our family spent the springs, summers, and falls. My access to cultural inst.i.tutions and artifacts was limited: not only were there no electrical appliances, furnaces, flush toilets, schools, or grocery stores, there was no TV, no radio shows available except for those on short-wave Russian stations, no movies, no theatre, and no libraries. But there were a lot of books. These ranged from scientific textbooks to detective novels, with everything in between. I was never told I couldn't read any of them, however unsuitable some of them may have been.

I learned to read early so I could read the comic strips because n.o.body else would take the time to read them out loud to me. The newspaper comics pages were called, then, the funny papers, although a lot of the strips were not funny but highly dramatic, like Terry and the Pirates, which featured a femme fatale called "The Dragon Lady" who used an amazingly long cigarette holder, or oddly surreal, like Little Orphan Annie-where were her eyes? The funny papers raised many questions in my young mind, some of which remain unanswered to this day. What exactly happened when Mandrake the Magician "gestured hypnotically"? Why did the Princess Snowflower character go around with a cauliflower on either ear? And if those weren't cauliflowers, what were they?

In addition to being a comics reader, I was an early writer, and I drew a lot: drawing and reading were the main recreations available in the woods, especially when it was raining. Very little of what I wrote or drew was in any way naturalistic, and in this I suspect I was like other children. Those under the age of eight gravitate more easily toward talking animals, dinosaurs, giants, flying humanoids of one kind or another-whether fairies, angels, or aliens-than they do to, say, portrayals of cozy domestic interiors or bucolic landscapes. "Draw a flower" was what we used to be taught in school, and by that was meant a tulip or a daffodil. But the kinds of flowers we really liked to draw had more in common with Venus flytraps, only a lot bigger, and with half-digested arms and legs sticking out of them.

I revisited my early non-naturalistic tendencies during a recent trip I took through my own juvenilia, or what survives of it. When I say "juvenilia," I'm not talking about the precocious teenage poems of William Blake or John Keats, but about things I was doing in the mid-1940s when I was six or seven. They centred around my superheroes, who were flying rabbits. Their names were Blue Bunny and White Bunny, and they were modelled upon two unimaginatively named real-life stuffed animals who did indeed go flying through the air, propelled by an age-old technology called "throwing." But it wasn't long before these feeble heroes morphed into two tougher creatures called Steel Bunny and Dotty Bunny, who flew in a more conventional superhero way, by means of capes. Steel's cape had bars on it, Dotty's had dots. So far, so clear.

My superhero rabbits were pale imitations of my older brother's more richly endowed creations. It was he who invented flying rabbits-extraterrestrial flying rabbits. His were equipped with vehicles and advanced technologies-s.p.a.ceships, airplanes, weaponry, the lot-and did battle not only with their hereditary enemies, the evil foxes, but with robots and man-eating plants and lethal animals. The planet where my brother's rabbits lived was called Bunnyland; mine inhabited a more mysterious place called Mischiefland. Now what impelled me to name it that?

The rabbits in Mischiefland led a disorganized existence. They floated around by means of balloons-unavailable during the Second World War and thus of great fascination to me. Also I had by this time read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, in which the wizard goes soaring away in a basket lifted by an enormous hot-air balloon. I allowed not only my rabbits but their pet cats to be levitated in this way. (I was not permitted to have a cat, and longed for one, so my rabbits had a lot of them.) The rabbits ate nothing but ice-cream cones, rare and desirable during wartime and the several lean years that followed. And they did tricks: specifically, a lot of twirling in the air, with the aid of their flying capes. They were only fitfully interested in shooting guns, pursuing criminals, saving the world, and so forth, though they did eject the occasional bullet from the occasional handgun, smiling eerily while doing it. But mostly, it seems, they just wanted to have fun and fool people.

Where did we kids discover the knowledge of flying capes, superpowers, other planets, and the like? In part, through the primitive comic-strip superheroes of the times, the most popular of which were Flash Gordon, for s.p.a.ce travel and robots; Superman and Captain Marvel, for extra strength, superpowers, and cape-based flying; and Batman, who was a mortal, with a non-functional cape-one that must have enc.u.mbered him somewhat as he clawed his way up the sides of buildings-but who nonetheless shared with Captain Marvel and Superman a weak or fatuous second ident.i.ty that acted as a disguise. (Captain Marvel was Billy Batson, the crippled newsboy; Superman was Clark Kent, the bespectacled reporter; Batman was Bruce Wayne, the very rich playboy who lounged around in a smoking jacket.) Those-crossed with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a dollop of Greek mythology, and our one small book on the solar system-were probably the sources of our core ideas. The solar-system book was sedate in and of itself, but I should point out that at that time the planets were still relatively unknown, and thus still open for population by extraterrestrial life, which in our case leaned heavily toward hostile humanoid aliens with one eye and three-fingered hands, animals with razor-sharp teeth and nasty lurking and disembowelling habits, fish that could shoot electric rays at you or gas you to death, and plant life equipped with poisonous p.r.i.c.kles or bulbs, or whiplike tentacles and rapid digestive systems. As our father was an entomologist and all-round naturalist, we also had ample access to scientific drawings of, for instance, pond life under the microscope, which may have contributed to our ideas of what Martians and Venusians and Neptunians and Saturnians should look like.

As for disguises, I note that our rabbits seldom felt the need for them: being short and young, we were our own Billy Batsons, and I a.s.sume that projecting your child ego onto a flying rabbit was enough of a dedoublement for us.

But where did the creators of the superheroes in the funny papers get their own ideas? I now find myself wondering. Ex nihilo nihil fit: from what ur-stock did these early superheroes descend? Evidently there were some key gene pools: Superman came from the Planet Krypton, so was clearly a child-in part-of the science fiction of the 1930s, which was filled with the letters K and Z and Y and X and Q-those oddities of the alphabet.

Captain Marvel's magic word, SHAZAM, was composed of the initial letters of a number of cla.s.sical G.o.ds and one non-cla.s.sical figure-Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles, and Mercury-so he descends to us, in part, through ancient mythology. Indeed, Captain Marvel's mentor, the wizard Shazamo, once palled around with the enchantress Circe, she of the man-to-pig transformational powers in The Odyssey. I think the creators of the Big Red Cheese must have read the same books that I myself read as a child. (Wonder Woman also sports this line of descent, with her links to the G.o.ddess Diana the Huntress, she of the chast.i.ty and silver bow, the bowstring of which must have become-we just know it!-Wonder Woman's potent la.s.so. In her early life-that is, in the comic books of the 1940s-Diana Prince, Wonder Woman's alter ego, turns to jelly and loses power whenever kissed by her love object, Steve Trevor; virginity being an attribute of the original G.o.ddess.) Batman, on the other hand, is born of technology alone. He is entirely human and therefore touchingly mortal, but he does have a lot of bat-machinery and bat-gizmos to help him in his fight against crime. The contemporary magazine most pertinent to him would thus not have been Weird Tales but Popular Mechanics. He is also-from the point of view of style and decor-the most futuristic of the superheroes: Gotham City, in its first iterations, was highly streamlined, with p.r.o.nounced art deco influences.

Mythology, science fiction of the other-planetary kind, and modern technology: they all do fit together. At first glimpse, mythology might seem to be the odd one out, being ancient rather than ultra-modern; but as we have seen in the cases of Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel, this is very far from being the case.

In fact, all of the most salient features of these early comic-book heroes-and thus of my own flying rabbits, closely related to them except for the ears and tails-have deep roots in literary and cultural history, and possibly in the human psyche itself.

OTHER WORLDS.

Where do other worlds and alien beings come from? Why do young children so routinely fear that there is something horrible under the bed, other than their slippers? Is the under-bed monster an archetype left over from prehistory, when we were hunted by cave tigers, or is it something else? Why do young children also believe that such inanimate objects as spoons and stones-let alone their stuffed teddy bears-have thoughts like theirs, and good and bad intentions toward them? Are these three questions related?

The ability to see things from the point of view of another being has been receiving a lot of attention from biologists lately, most notably Frans de Waal in his book The Age of Empathy. It used to be thought that only human beings could imagine life from the position of another, but not so, it seems. Elephants can, and chimpanzees, but not monkeys. Only a being with a sense of "self" can do this, it is supposed. One way of testing for this sense-of-self capacity is through mirrors. Does an animal looking at its reflection in a mirror recognize the reflection as itself? Intriguing experiments have been done in which elephants are presented with elephant-sized mirrors, having first had a visible mark painted on one side of the head and an invisible mark painted on the other side to exclude the sense of touch as a factor. If the elephant sees the mark on its reflected image and then touches the real mark on its head with its trunk, it must know that the reflection is "itself." Often, before coming to the realization that the reflection is indeed itself, an elephant will look behind the mirror. So will a human child.

If you can image-or imagine-yourself, you can image-or imagine-a being not-yourself; and you can also imagine how such a being may see the world, a world that includes you. You can see yourself from outside. To the imagined being, you may look like a cherished loved one or a potential friend, or you may look like a tasty dinner or a bitter enemy. When a young child is imagining what's under the bed, it is also imagining what it might represent to that unseen creature: usually prey. It is possibly not a good idea to tell the little ones that they look good enough to eat. Frisky the Cat wouldn't be bothered by such a statement, lacking as she does a capacity for empathy, but Charlie the Child may well have hysterics.

One of the more brilliant innovations of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds is that it so clearly sets forth what we puny human beings might look like to G.o.dlike intellects far superior to ours. From that time to this, we've been told many stories along these lines. Or, as Shakespeare put it, about G.o.ds thought of as somewhat closer to home than Mars: "As flies to wanton boys are we to th' G.o.ds,/They kill us for their sport."

Other worlds with strange inhabitants have been numerous in human mythologies and literatures. I'd speculate that, including all the fantasylands devised by children that never see publication, there are many more imaginary locations than there are real ones. Whether they are places we go after death-good or bad-or homes of the G.o.ds or supernaturals, or lost civilizations, or planets in a galaxy far, far away, they all have this in common: they aren't here and now. They may be long ago or far away; they may be situated in that nebulous region, "the future"; they may even be given real estate in "another dimension" of the s.p.a.ce-time we ourselves inhabit. The convention seems to be that other beings can pop into our living rooms from somewhere else, but they can't drag along the entire other world from which they come. We, on the other hand, can slip through a cupboard or through a wormhole in s.p.a.ce and find ourselves transported to their realm. Stories about encounters with other beings thus always involve travel, one way or another. Something or someone moves from "there" to "here," or we ourselves move from "here" to "there." Portals, gateways, waystations, and vehicles abound, as in-come to think of it-ancient myths, with their cave entrances and chariots of fire.

Our ability to conceive of imaginary places-a somewhere that isn't immediately tangible in the way that the dinnertime pork chop is tangible-appears very early in our individual lives. At first-when we're extremely young-it's a case of out of sight, out of mind: objects hidden from our view simply disappear, then appear again. It takes us a while to figure out that the rubber duck that went behind the curtain is still somewhere rather than nowhere.

Once we've decided things go to another place rather than simply ceasing to exist, we find it hard to shake that notion. Being "here," then suddenly not being here: is that where the concepts of, for instance, afterlives and teleportation originate? Does Star Trek's Scotty derive his ability to beam people up from the discovery that the rubber duck in our early games of peek-a-boo was still there really? Is dead Granddad floating around in the spirit world trying to get in touch with us? And will we, too, float around in that way, since it is very hard to picture the self as being nowhere at all? Surely the dead go somewhere, other than the tomb. Once, they went to the Egyptian Afterlife to get their souls weighed, or to the Fields of Asphodel, or up into the sky to become constellations, or to a physical location called Heaven. Now, perhaps, they might go to the Planet Krypton or wherever it is that E.T. went. And are the Fields of Asphodel and the Planet Krypton more or less the same place?

One method of approaching Other Worlds would be to trace their literary lines of descent-from the Mesopotamian underworld to the Egyptian Afterlife to the Domain of Pluto to the Christian h.e.l.l and Heaven to the Utopia of Sir Thomas More to the Islands of the Houyhnhnms and Dr. Moreau, and finally to Planet X and Gethen and Chiron. But Other Worlds have existed in many cultures, within which they can trace many separate literary and cultural lines of descent. Could it be that the tendency to produce such worlds is an essential property of the human imagination, via the limbic system and the neocortex, just as empathy is?

THE OUTFITS.

Once upon a time, superhuman beings wore robes, like angels, or nothing, like devils, but the twentieth-century superhero outfit has more proximate fashion origins. The skin-tight clothing with the bathing suit over the abdominal parts, the wide, fancy belt, and the calf-high boots most probably derive from archaic turn-of-the century circus attire, especially that of high-wire artists and strongmen. (With pleasing circularity, the stars of World Wide Wrestling now dress up in costumes similar to those of comic-book characters whose own colourful and six-pack-disclosing attire recalls that of earlier bemuscled showmen.) The cape may descend from the knights so prominent in the Pre-Raphaelite art that would have been familiar to the originators of these figures, or-closer to hand-from stage magicians, or, at a stretch, from Bela Lugosi as Dracula, in the black-and-white film of that name, back when vampires were vile and smelled bad rather than being sparkly in the sunlight and love's young dream, as they seem to have become today. There was also the Cloak of Invisibility that featured in old folk tales, resurfaced in modern scientific-discovery dress in Wells's Invisible Man, made a reappearance in its original magic form in the Harry Potter books, and became a new kind of camouflage material in William Gibson's Neuromancer. But none of the early 1940s comic-book superheroes had a Cloak of Invisibility, probably because it was hard to draw a picture of a person being invisible. (The closest we come is perhaps Wonder Woman's transparent helicopter, indicated by a dotted line.) The mask was not obligatory for superheroes: neither Superman nor Captain Marvel needed such an ident.i.ty-concealer, as each had a whole other body to slip into. (Clark Kent's ability to peel off his reporter suit in a phone booth and suddenly expand into someone a great deal bigger and more muscular, like one of those dried-gel Santa Clauses you drop into water, was never adequately explained.) Batman's mask may have come from the commedia dell'arte tradition, or from knights-incognito such as Ivanhoe. Or-and these are more sinister origins-from the Phantom of the Opera, or from Fantomas, a masked and also French evil genius from the turn of the century. Or possibly just from the standard masked robber of the comics. As Batman himself was mortal and did not transform from one bodily shape into another, you can see why he would need a mask.

Outfits-or special costumes and regalia-are of course very old. We are familiar with ceremonies such as university graduations-you are presented with a hood item or hat or scroll, and thus become something you weren't before. At the invest.i.ture ceremonies of popes, the new pope is given the Fisherman's Ring, the wearing of which grants him, in the eyes of believing others, a huge amount of spiritual power that the individual man would not have without this symbol. (Rings have had special abilities for a long time; see the magic rings in One Thousand and One Nights, as well as Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle and J. R. R. Tolkien's not unrelated The Lord of the Rings, both of which draw on much earlier traditions.) In coronations, the magic items are the crown and the sceptre: they embody the role of king, as the king was once thought to embody the realm he ruled. The further back you go, the more significant the objects worn or carried become. In the age of the G.o.d-kings, such as those of ancient Egypt or Sumer, the man or woman and the costume and regalia were almost one and the same: you were the role, and the role was the garment and its embellishments. You inhabited it rather than just wearing it.

Consider the oldest poem we know anything about, the Mesopotamian cycle sometimes called "Inanna's Journey to h.e.l.l." In it, the life-G.o.ddess Inanna descends to the Underworld to confront her sister, the G.o.ddess of death, Ereshkigal. To defend herself during the trip, Inanna puts on and carries an astonishing number of talismanic and powerful objects: the special sandals, the seven insignia, the desert crown, a queenly wig, a rod, a number of gems, two pectorals, a golden ring, some face makeup, and a robe of sovereignty. But the laws of the Underworld say that she must give up each one-you couldn't take it with you, even then-and when all her protective charms are gone, she's naked; whereupon she dies and is hung up on a spike. For every Achilles there's a heel, a condition of vulnerability; for every Superman there's a kryptonite, a force that negates special powers.

The Mesopotamian story does have a somewhat happy outcome. Inanna is the G.o.ddess of life and reproduction, so it would be a catastrophe for her to remain in the land of the dead. But no mortal can be sent to the Underworld to resurrect her with the Water of Life, since any mortal who goes there will die; so the G.o.d Enkil makes two non-human beings from the dirt beneath his fingernails and sends them down instead, thus giving us-we might say-the ancestors of Golems, and statues that come to life, and, ultimately, robots. We are not told that on her journey back to the upper world Inanna regains all her regalia, but it must have been so because later in the poem she is again wearing her crown of authority.

How much older than Mesopotamia is the connection between special clothing and talismans and heightened powers? Quite a lot older. Some of the very few human figures in Paleolithic cave paintings are in fact semi-human: they are thought to be shamans who by putting on the skins and horns of animals become part animal themselves, and thus able to join the animals in thought, to determine their whereabouts, and perhaps to ask them to make a gift of their bodies to the hungry tribe.

It's the outfit and the ritual a.s.sociated with it that embodies the shamanistic power. The shamans of hunter-gatherers lived with the community, not in a palace or temple. Most of the time they went about their daily lives like everyone else, but when occasion required it they transformed themselves into their magic alter egos in order to serve the community. There's an Australian Aboriginal film called Ten Canoes, set in pre-contact days, in which we can see this transformation taking place. The shaman's powers are needed; he steps behind some bushes and emerges in full body paint, ready for magic. He is two people: his ordinary self and his other self, powerful in extraordinary ways, and able to travel between the seen and the unseen. His special decoration, just like Captain Marvel's, is a signal to the watchers that he is in his altered state.

THE DOUBLE IDENt.i.tY.

The doubleness of superheroes thus has a very long ancestry. But more immediate ancestors abound in the period just preceding the advent of the comic book.

In nineteenth-century fiction, doubles are plentiful, as they are, indeed, in nineteenth-century opera and ballet-think of the white and black swan princesses of Swan Lake. Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and his shorter, younger, and hairier double, the nasty Mr. Hyde, Wilde's Dorian Gray and his diseased and corrupt Picture, and Poe's William Wilson and his taunting twin are among the best-known literary examples. Some speculate that such good/bad pairs may have at least some roots in the lives of real people-such as Jonathan Wild the thief-taker, whose secret life was as a mastermind of crime, or Deacon Brodie of Edinburgh, a respectable gentleman whose midnight misdeeds are thought to have inspired Stevenson.

But these are sinister doubles. For the weak or frivolous alter ego acting as a front for the strong, virtuous hero-more like Clark Kent and Superman-we should most likely be looking at the Scarlet Pimpernel-dithering fop by day, steel-nerved rescuer by night-and possibly even Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo, in which the hero a.s.sumes several aliases-including that of an eccentric English lord-in order to reward virtue and punish crime. Sherlock Holmes, that supreme intellect, clue-tracker, and criminal-hunter, was a master of disguise, often posing as someone less than he really was: a feeble, kindly old clergyman, for instance, or an out-of-work groom.

In addition to his disguising "normal" alter ego, the superhero of the 1940s was required to have a powerful enemy or two. Carl Jung made no secret of the fact that he based much of his mapping of the psyche on literature and art. For instance, his theory of the "Shadow"-that dark double of the Self-has a great deal in common with, for instance, The Tales of Hoffmann, or indeed any of the "double" narratives I've already mentioned. A comic-book character leading a split life and engaged in a battle between Good and Evil might well be expected to show Jungian characteristics, and in fact Batman is an almost perfect case study.

Batman has three main enemies, who to a Jungian would obviously be projections of Bruce Wayne that Wayne himself has not come to terms with. (In Blakean terms, the two male enemies would be called his Spectres and the female one might be his Emanation.) For Bruce, the female element is conflicted-he's a confirmed bachelor, and has no nice-girl Lois Lane sentimental figure in his life. But the sinuous and desirable Catwoman with whom he frequently skirmishes must be his Jungian "dark anima" figure: even a child could recognize that there was a lot of unresolved electricity going on between those two.

The s.a.d.i.s.tic card-playing Joker, with his sinister-clown appearance, is Batman's Jungian Shadow-his own interest in dress-ups and jokes turned malicious. There's another Shadow villain-the Penguin-who wears an outfit reminiscent of period cartoons of capitalists, with spats, cigarette holder, and top hat. His civilian alias even has a three-barrelled, pretentious, old-plutocrat faux-English name: Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot. The Penguin is the "rich" side of playboy Bruce Wayne gone rancid.