In Other Worlds Part 9

To go with the slippers, which were issued to them next.

I guess I walked into that one.

You sure did, he said, grinning.

It got better. One of the girls was a s.e.xpot, the other was more serious-minded and could discuss art, literature, and philosophy, not to mention theology. The girls seemed to know which was required of them at any given moment, and would switch around according to the moods and inclinations of Boyd and Will.

And so the time pa.s.sed in harmony. As the perfect days went by, the men learned more about the Planet of Aa'A. First, no meat was eaten on it, and there were no carnivorous animals, though there were lots of b.u.t.terflies and singing birds. Need I add that the G.o.d worshipped on Aa'A took the form of a huge pumpkin?

Second, there was no birth as such. These women grew on trees, on a stem running into the tops of their heads, and were picked when ripe by their predecessors. Third, there was no death as such. When the time came, each of the Peach Women-to call them by the names by which Boyd and Will soon referred to them-would simply disorganize her molecules, which would then be rea.s.sembled via the trees into a new, fresh woman. So the very latest woman was, in substance as well as in form, identical with the very first.

How did they know when the time had come? To disorganize their molecules?

First, by the soft wrinkles their velvety skin would develop when overripe. Second, by the flies.

The flies?

The fruit flies that would hover in clouds around their headdresses of red netting.

This is your idea of a happy story?

Wait. There's more.

After some time this existence, wonderful though it was, began to pall on Boyd and Will. For one thing, the women kept checking up on them to make sure they were happy. This can get tedious for a fellow. Also, there was nothing these babes wouldn't do. They were completely shameless, or without shame, whichever. On cue they would display the most whorish behaviour. s.l.u.t was hardly the word for them. Or they could become shy and prudish, cringing, modest; they would even weep and scream-that, too, was on order.

At first Will and Boyd found this exciting, but after a while it began to irritate.

When you hit the women, no blood came out, only juice. When you hit them harder, they dissolved into sweet mushy pulp, which pretty soon became another Peach Woman. They didn't appear to experience pain, as such, and Will and Boyd began to wonder whether they experienced pleasure either. Had all the ecstasy been a put-on show?

When questioned about this, the gals were smiling and evasive. You could never get to the bottom of them.

You know what I'd like right about now? said Will one fine day.

The same thing I'd like, I bet, said Boyd.

A great big grilled steak, rare, dripping with blood. A big stack of French fries. And a nice cold beer.

Ditto. And then a rip-roaring dogfight with those scaly sons of guns from Xenor.

You got the idea.

They decided to go exploring. Despite having been told that Aa'A was the same in every direction, and that they would only find more trees and more bowers and more birds and b.u.t.terflies and more luscious women, they set out toward the west. After a long time and no adventures whatsoever, they came up against an invisible wall. It was slippery, like gla.s.s, but soft and yielding when you pushed on it. Then it would spring back into shape. It was higher than they could possibly reach or climb. It was like a huge crystal bubble.

I think we're trapped inside a big transparent t.i.t, said Boyd.

They sat down at the foot of the wall, overcome by a profound despair.

This joint is peace and plenty, said Will. It's a soft bed at night and sweet dreams, it's tulips on the sunny breakfast table, it's the little woman making coffee. It's all the loving you ever dreamed of, in every shape and form. It's everything men think they want when they're out there, fighting in another dimension of s.p.a.ce. It's what other men have given their lives for. Am I right?

You said a mouthful, said Boyd.

But it's too good to be true, said Will. It must be a trap. It may even be some devilish mind-device of the Xenorians, to keep us from being in the war. It's Paradise, but we can't get out of it. And anything you can't get out of is h.e.l.l.

But this isn't h.e.l.l. It's happiness, said one of the Peach Women who was materializing from the branch of a nearby tree. There's nowhere to go from here. Relax. Enjoy yourselves. You'll get used to it.

And that's the end of the story.

That's it? she says. You're going to keep those two men cooped up in there forever?

I did what you wanted. You wanted happiness. But I can keep them in or let them out, depending how you want it.

Let them out, then.

Outside is death. Remember?

Oh. I see. She turns on her side, pulls the fur coat over her, slides her arm around him. You're wrong about the Peach Women though. They aren't the way you think.

Wrong how?

You're just wrong.

The Lizard Man of Xenor by Margaret Atwood:.

An Open Letter from

Margaret Atwood to the.

Judson Independent.

School District.

First, I would like to thank those who have dedicated themselves so energetically to the banning of my novel The Handmaid's Tale. It's encouraging to know that the written word is still taken so seriously.

That thought aside, I would like to congratulate the students, parents, and teachers who have supported the use of my book in advanced placement courses. They have aligned themselves against the censurers, book-banners, and book-burners throughout the ages, and have stood up for open discussion and a free expression of opinion-which, last time I looked, was still the American way, though that way is under pressure.

I would also like to comment on the objections to the book that have been made. The remark "offensive to Christians" amazes me-why are some Christians so quick to see themselves in this mirror? Nowhere in the book is the regime identified as Christian. It puts into literal practise some pa.s.sages from the Bible, but these pa.s.sages are not from the New Testament. In fact, the regime is busily exterminating nuns, Baptists, Quakers, and so forth, in the same way that the Bolsheviks exterminated the Mensheviks. The only person who says anything Christian is the heroine herself. You will find her own version of The Lord's Prayer at the end of Chapter 30.

As for s.e.xual explicitness, The Handmaid's Tale is a good deal less interested in s.e.x than is much of the Bible. Leaving aside the Song of Solomon, there's quite a bit of s.e.x-rape, incest of various kinds, seduction, l.u.s.t, prost.i.tution, public intercourse on a rooftop with one's father's concubines, and more. One of the things that makes the Bible such a necessary book is its refusal to throw a lace tablecloth over this kind of behaviour.

The s.e.xual point in my book would seem to be that all totalitarianisms try to control s.e.x and reproduction one way or another. Many have forbidden inter-racial and inter-cla.s.s unions. Some have tried to limit childbirth, others have tried to enforce it. It was a common practise for slave owners to rape their slaves, for the simple purpose of making more slaves. And so on.

The other point would be that the free choice of a loved one-when denied by a regime or a culture-is going to happen anyway, though under such conditions it will be both brave and dangerous. I give you Romeo and Juliet. Also, when marriage itself has been made into a travesty, talk of s.e.x within the bonds of marriage becomes simply fatuous.

Two last thoughts. First, I put nothing into my book that human beings have not already done. It's not a pretty picture, but it's our picture, or part of it. Second, if you see a person heading toward a huge hole in the ground, is it not a friendly act to warn him?

Again, I congratulate you, and wish you well. Your thoughtfulness and courage have set an example well worth following.

Sincerely, Margaret Atwood.

Weird Tales Covers.

of the 1930s.

" ... you could have a pack of nude women who've been dead for three thousand years, with lithe, curvaceous figures, ruby-red lips, azure hair in a foam of tumbled curls, and eyes like snake-filled pits ... I could throw in some sacrificial virgins as well, with metal breastplates and silver ankle chains and diaphanous vestments. And a pack of ravening wolves, extra ... Popular on the covers-they'll writhe all over a fellow, they have to be beaten off with rifle b.u.t.ts."

These words appear in my 2000 novel, The Blind a.s.sa.s.sin. They're spoken by Alex Thomas, who's a writer of pulp-magazine fiction in the 1930s. He's not writing at this moment in the novel, however: he's picking up a girl in a park. His initial method is storytelling, always a good thing to know something about, whichever role you're playing. If you're the pickup artist, it's as well to be able to tell a good story or two, and if you're the target you need to be able to determine if you've heard them before.

The fictional Alex Thomas got his beautiful vamps and their adornments straight off the covers of Weird Tales, definitely the sort of magazine he'd have wanted to publish in. In the 1930s and '40s, Weird Tales published, well, weird tales: fantasy, horror, and sci-fi of the bug-eyed monster variety. Its covers were in lurid colour, lovingly drawn in pastels by Margaret Brundage-the only female pulp cover artist of her era-who was fresh from a career as a fashion designer and ill.u.s.trator.

Brundage specialized in vicious or threatened young women, sometimes totally nude, but otherwise dressed in colourful and revealing outfits involving metal bra.s.sieres, translucent veils, and ankle chains both decorative and functional, often accessorized with whips and shackles. Large fanged animals are a recurring motif: the Brundage women have equivocal relationships not only with wolves but with other charismatic carnivores. Sometimes the women appear frightened by their dangerous friends, but they may also stride forth, alpha females leading the pack.

The Brundage covers run from 1933 through the early 1940s, making them a perfect source for my invention, Alex Thomas; so it's clear where Alex got his cliches. But-looking back at these cliches now-I wonder where I myself got them? I wasn't born when Brundage was creating most of her covers; yet her subject matter seems very familiar to me. When you're a child, you soak up images like a sponge. It doesn't matter to you where they come from. In those timeless years between infancy and, say, seven, what is has always been: in that way, children inhabit the realm of myth.

In the 1940s, when I was a comic generation kid, there were certain things we all knew. We took it as a given that children could make friends with wolf packs, and might even be raised by them; these packs would rush to their aid in times of peril. I had my own imaginary pack of this kind, and therefore was not alarmed by Al Capp's Wolf Gal of the popular 1940s cartoon strip L'il Abner. Wolf Gal must have been the first Brundage-like carnivorous pinup I ever saw. She had white hair and fierce white eyebrows, she most likely ate men, she was scantily dressed, and like all the members of Capp's harem of eccentric glamour gals (stunners such as Stupefyin' Jones, Appa.s.sionata Von Climax, and the mud-covered pig-fancier Moonbeam McSwine), she was what was once called "bountifully endowed." Hubba hubba, men said in those days: a term obscure in origin but most likely a variant of hubsche, the German word for "beautiful."

Books and characters in books, pictures and elements in pictures-they all have families and ancestors, just like people. What generated Wolf Gal? Probably Brundage's wolf gals of Weird Tales, which-I'd bet-Capp would have read and drawn from. Was their grandparent Kipling's The Jungle Book, in which the wolf-raised child was a boy? Did these clawed lovelies devolve from the high art of the late nineteenth century, so fond of depicting femmes fatales paired with animals to show how animalistic they were underneath? Or does the line stretch way back, to folklore and tales of lycanthropy, or even further back, to times when animals were thought to a.s.sume human form at will?

The enduring popularity of werewolf stories must be based on something, and that something may be close to a wish. Was Margaret Brundage, unknown to herself, drawing early versions of that trope of female freedom, women who run with the wolves? Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, was neither the first nor the last to supply seductive women with canine teeth somewhat larger than is generally desirable in a girlfriend. (It's to be noted that Wolf Gal has no Mr. Wolf Gal, and we strongly suspect that Wolf Gal-like some furry Turandot or a female spider-has been the death of all lovelorn aspirants to her hand, or paw.) Then there are the women in the twin tinnies-those two shiny cups, attached to the torso with fine chain link-that abound in Brundage's oeuvre. Richard Wolinsky produced a recorded doc.u.mentary called The Girl in the Bra.s.s Bra.s.siere: An Oral History of Science Fiction 19201950, a t.i.tle that acknowledges the ubiquity of the trope in early twentieth-century sci-fi and fantasy, but like everything else pictorial, this item of clothing had its visual predecessors.

The message borne by the hard-but-soft frontage is mixed. One part of it derives from orientalism. Before moving to Weird Tales, Margaret Brundage drew covers for another pulp, Oriental Stories. In the exotic maidens she portrayed, Brundage was lifting from a rich vein of nineteenth-century Victorian orientalist painting, some of it purporting to depict such things as harems and girl-slave markets, but some of it purely imaginative, inspired by the hugely influential One Thousand and One Nights. This iteration of the metal bra-non-functional, skimpy, and bejewelled-invokes bondage and/or other depravities. Robert E. Howard of Conan the Barbarian fame-a frequent publisher in Weird Tales-was quite keen on both slave girls and depravities, and used the Brundage dress code. In The Blind a.s.sa.s.sin, I based Alex Thomas's writhing women with eyes like snake-filled pits on simple-hearted Conan's encounters with the uncanny seductresses of the corrupt, decaying cities through which he marauds.

Bra.s.siere advertis.e.m.e.nts from the 1940s and 1950s hint at the second part of the twin-tinnie lineage: impermeability. Maidenform was just one of the brands featuring blindingly white bras with concentric circles of st.i.tching that suggested armour. Their ads that coupled a state of undress with public activities-"I dreamed I was a private eye in my Maidenform bra"; "I dreamed I was a lady editor in my Maidenform bra"-presented the bra less as an aid to seduction than as a guarantee of security and, combined with the name, of chast.i.ty. Athene, the maiden G.o.ddess, with her shield and spear and her helmet, is perhaps a distant relative.

A closer relative is the Valkyrie, a virgin demi-G.o.ddess from Norse mythology whose job was to gather up dead warrior-heroes and cart them off to Odin's banquet hall. Richard Wagner brought the Valkyries to the opera stage in his Ring Cycle, but to a 1940s and 1950s audience they were more familiar as the parody conception of what a Wagnerian soprano should look like: large metal bra.s.siere or corset, long braids, helmet complete with Viking-fantasy wings. Sure enough, there's Bugs Bunny in the 1957 cartoon What's Opera, Doc?, cross-dressing as the Valkyrie Brunnhilde, with pink-winged helmet and two tiny bra.s.s cups stuck on his chest.

Wonder Woman, the comic-book heroine who first appeared in 1941, doesn't have the full metal jacket, but she does have enough shiny stuff on her front to indicate her lineage. She, too, is related to the virgin G.o.ddesses-the chaste moon-G.o.ddess Artemis, in her case. Supergirls of all kinds, good and bad, are generally unmarried: Wonder Soccer Mom, amazing though she may be in real life, somehow doesn't quite fit the image.

The metal bra was capable of carrying two simultaneous undermeanings: vulnerability, especially when it was flimsily attached to a girl with big, scared eyes; or strength and staunch resistance, when the "breast plates," as they were called in the pulps, were more substantial and their wearer looked determined. Brundage sometimes tried for both at once: a girl in a bra.s.s bra.s.siere and little else, with big, scared eyes, tiptoeing forward with fear but determination, anklets quivering, to unlock some handsome fellow from a cage.

The "low art" of one age often cribs from the "high art" of the preceding one; and "high art" just as frequently borrows from the most vulgar elements of its own times. The Lady Chatterley p.o.r.no-trial wars were fought over whether several words you could see scribbled on a washroom wall every day had the right to be written inside something that purported to be "literature." The Weird Tales covers of the 1930s are just one example of the way cultural memes transmit themselves, taking their meaning in part from their context and from our own knowledge of it. Thus, from Wagner's ultra-serious Valkyries to Brundage's equivocal bra.s.s bras, to Maidenform's faux-naive undergarments, to Bugs Bunny's skimpy travesties, and finally to Madonna's witty pop-show quotation of the entire tradition. And from the wolf-women of myth and folklore to Brundage's wolf-girls, to Al Capp's gloss on them in his L'il Abner Wolf Gal, to me as child reader, and finally to my invention, Alex Thomas.

Alex is using Weird Tales pulp schlock as foreplay. He knows it's schlock, and the girl he's seducing knows it as well, but that's part of the attraction, for her as well as for him. "I don't think I could fob those off on you," he says of the depraved women and the maidens in s.e.xual peril he's conjuring up for her. "Lurid isn't your style."

"You never know," the girl replies. "I might like them."

And so she does.

Acknowledgements.

Many thanks to the following, who made the Ellmann Lectures so enjoyable for me: Joseph Skibell, director of the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature; Barbara Freer Skibell; Sharon Hart-Green, a.s.sociate professor of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, University of Toronto; Michael P. Kramer, professor of English, Bar-Ilan University; and Esther Schor, professor of English, Princeton University. Members of the Emory administration: James W. Wagner, president of the university; Earl Lewis, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs; Rosemary M. Magee, vice president and secretary of the university; Robin Forman, dean of Emory College of Arts and Sciences. Alicia Franck and Tom Jenkins, Becky Herring, Nicholas Surbey, Levin Arnsperger, and the many members of the Emory University faculty and staff who also contributed.

I would also like to thank my agents, Phoebe Larmore and Vivienne Schuster; my editors, Ellen Seligman of McClelland & Stewart, Canada; Nan Talese of Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, U.S.A.; and Lennie Goodings of Virago Press, U.K. Also: my copy editor, Heather Sangster; John Shoesmith and Jennifer Toews of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library; the Judith Merril Collection at the Toronto Public Library; and the Widener Library at Harvard University. Thanks to all publishers who have granted permission for some of the earlier pieces, and to the many newspaper and magazine editors with whom I have worked over the years. Finally, thanks to my office staff, Sarah Webster, Anne Joldersma, Laura Stenberg, and Penny Kavanaugh. And to the many writers included in this book, whose work I have enjoyed over the course of sixty-odd years.

Permissions Acknowledgements.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: The three chapters in Part 1 are based on the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature, delivered at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, 2426 October 2010.

Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy. Originally published as "An Unfashionable Sensibility" in The Nation, 4 December 1976, pp. 6012. Second Words: Selected Critical Prose 19601982 by Margaret Atwood (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1982), pp. 27278. Reprinted with permission of the publishers.

H. Rider Haggard's She (New York: Random House, 2002), pp. xviixxiv. Moving Targets: Writing with Intent, 19822004 by Margaret Atwood (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2004), pp. 23441. Curious Pursuits by Margaret Atwood (London: Virago Press, 2005), pp. 24956. Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose 19832005 by Margaret Atwood (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers/Perseus Books, 2005), pp. 198204. Reprinted with permission of the publishers.

The Queen of Quinkdom: The Birthday of the World and Other Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin. The New York Review of Books, Vol. 49, No. 14, 26 September 2002. Curious Pursuits by Margaret Atwood (London: Virago Press, 2005), pp. 297308. Moving Targets: Writing with Intent, 19822004 by Margaret Atwood (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2004), pp. 28192. Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose 19832005 by Margaret Atwood (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers/Perseus Books, 2005), pp. 24353. Reprinted with permission of the publishers.

Arguing Against Ice Cream: Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age by Bill McKibben. The New York Review of Books, 12 June 2003. Moving Targets: Writing with Intent, 19822004 by Margaret Atwood (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2004), pp. 33950. Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose 19832005 by Margaret Atwood (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers/Perseus Books, 2005), pp. 294304. Reprinted with permission of the publishers.

George Orwell: Some Personal Connections. An address broadcast on the BBC Radio 3 on 13 June 2003. Reprinted as "Orwell and Me," Guardian, 16 June 2003. Moving Targets: Writing with Intent, 19822004 by Margaret Atwood (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2004), pp. 33138. Curious Pursuits by Margaret Atwood (London: Virago Press, 2005), pp. 33340. Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose 19832005 by Margaret Atwood (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers/Perseus Books, 2005), pp. 28793. Reprinted with permission of the publishers.

Ten Ways of Looking at The Island of Doctor Moreau, by H. G. Wells (London: Penguin, 2005). Curious Pursuits by Margaret Atwood (London: Virago Press, 2005), pp. 38396. Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose 19832005 by Margaret Atwood (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers/Perseus Books, 2005), pp. 38698. Reprinted with permission of the publishers.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. Originally published as "Brave New World: Kazuo Ishiguro's novel really is chilling" in Slate magazine (www.slate.com), 1 April 2005. Reprinted with permission of Slate magazine.

After the Last Battle: Visa for Avalon by Bryher. The New York Review of Books, Volume LII, No. 6, 7 April 2005.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2007). Reprinted as "Everyone Is Happy Now," Guardian, 17 November 2009.

Of the Madness of Mad Scientists: Jonathan Swift's Grand Academy. From Seeing Further: The Story of Science & The Royal Society, ed. Bill Bryson (London: HarperPress, 2010), pp. 3748.

Cryogenics: A Symposium. Originally published in When the Wild Comes Leaping Up: Personal Encounters with Nature, ed. David Suzuki (Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2002), pp. 14347.