In Other Worlds Part 2

What do the G.o.ds want, or G.o.d, if it's a monotheism?

The answers range everywhere from your first-born to burnt kidney fat to endless devotion and obedience to not sleeping with the wrong person to having to avenge your murdered father by killing your mother. That's the problem with G.o.ds. They specialize in cleft sticks-d.a.m.ned if you do, d.a.m.ned if you don't-and they're maddeningly oblique. G.o.ds don't come with clear instructions; or not according to the stories about them.

What are the right relations.h.i.+ps between men and women?

Judging from the many and varied myths that tell of strenuous relations.h.i.+ps between the s.e.xes-huge female monster deities cut to pieces by heroic upstart-G.o.ds, women raped by immortals, mortals who are seduced by G.o.ddesses and then come to grief, G.o.ds killing guardian dragons and taking over female oracles, female demi-deities revenging themselves on faithless men, men losing paradise because women ate the apple-this seems to be uneasy ground. Stories involving gender conflict and/or separate spheres of influence-Artemis-moon by night, Apollo-sun by day-seem to be central to most mythologies. The Queen of the Night and the solar imagery in Mozart's Magic Flute did not come from nowhere.

Why were mythologies so apparently universal in what we think of as pre-literate societies? Some commentators see them as inevitable, given human grammar: if you've invented the past tense and the future tense, and if you are a question-asking being-which h.o.m.o sapiens is-then sooner or later the creative part of the brain is going to come up with a point of origin and an ultimate destination, even if it's the cyclic destruction and re-creation of the universe.

Early myth systems preceded writing, but once literacy spread, the old, oral mythologies were absorbed into the new medium, which at first simply recorded them-The Iliad existed in oral form before it was written down, we are told-and then imitated them, as Virgil did with The Aeneid. However, when people cease to believe that myths are literally true, believe-it-or-die theologies and perform-it-or-be-d.a.m.ned rituals cease to be based on them, "art" separates itself from liturgy and ritual and iconography, and myths become hidden structural principles or else the subject matter in an art that is essentially allegorical or decorative.

We may repeat the old theologies and the old rituals out of habit or a need for comfort, and we can reinterpret them in various ways; but at the same time we've been known to create new myths. Marxism and its cousin, Christian socialism, were such neo-mythical structures. Their pattern was a linear one, like that of Christianity, but for G.o.d's grand plan they subst.i.tuted History, a G.o.dlike ent.i.ty that would unfold in an inevitable way and justify you if you were on its right side-the side of whoever was urging you on. Then, after a number of obstacles had been overcome, a utopian society would emerge in which all inequalities and sufferings would be eliminated, much like the New Jerusalem. Here is William Morris in his inevitable-future socialist myth-making mode: Come, then, let us cast off fooling, and put by ease and rest, For the CAUSE alone is worthy till the good days bring the best.

Come, join in the only battle wherein no man can fail, Where whoso fadeth and dieth, yet his deed shall still prevail.

Ah! come, cast off all fooling, for this, at least, we know: That the Dawn and the Day is coming, and forth the Banners go.

-The Day Is Coming.

Science, too, has generated new myth systems. (By "myth" I mean a story central to our self-understanding: nothing about truth or falsehood is implied.) Here, for instance, is a new creation myth: the universe began with a Big Bang. Then the Earth was formed of cosmic dust. What came before the Big Bang? A singularity. What is a singularity? We don't know.

Here is a new origin-of-people myth: people emerged via something called evolutionary forces from pre-human life forms that also so emerged. What created the rules for evolution? Life did. Where did life come from? We're not sure, but we're working on it. Why are we on Earth? No particular reason. Any idea why we should behave well? Most likely because food-gathering goes better in small groups, such as were common in the Pleistocene, if the males aren't murdering each other all the time and copulating with the other males' mates. What about relations.h.i.+ps between men and women? We're studying that now, through brain measurements and pheromones and anthropological evidence and, oh, all sorts of things, and we hope to have a mathematical formula for falling in love any time soon. How about a belief in G.o.d, or G.o.ds? Well, granted, most cultures have had such a thing. Maybe such a belief is an evolved adaptation. Maybe your survival chances are better if you think there is a powerful being on your side who has a master plan. But there probably isn't much more to it than that.

As a story, the scientific mythos is not very comforting. Probably that's why it hasn't become wildly popular: we human beings prefer stories that have a central role in them for us, that preserve some of our mystery and thus some of our dignity, and that imply there might be help at hand if we really need some. The scientific version of our existence on this planet may very well be physically true, but we don't like it much. It isn't cuddly. There aren't many tunes you can hum in the shower.

Thus: myths are stories that are central to their cultures and that are taken seriously enough that people organize their ritual and emotional lives around them, and can even start wars over them. Such stories go underground, as it were, when the core statements about truth and reality repeated in the stories cease to be entirely, factually believed. But they then emerge in other guises, such as Art, or political ideologies.

Or films like Avatar. Or books like The Left Hand of Darkness. For every question that myths address, SF has addressed also. Indeed, it's arguable that this form and its subforms have subsumed the mythic areas abandoned by literature after the meta-theological poetics of Paradise Lost and the meta-theological fabulations of The Pilgrim's Progress and the extended theology-based other-world-building of William Blake's long "prophecies."

Before going into specifics, I'll say a little about the history of the term science fiction. This label brings together two terms you'd think would be mutually exclusive, since science-from scientia, meaning knowledge-is supposed to concern itself with demonstrable facts, and fiction-which derives from the Latin root verb fingere, meaning to mould, devise, or feign-denotes a thing that is invented. With science fiction, one term is often thought to cancel out the other. Thus such books may be judged as factual predictions, with the fiction part-the story, the characters, the invention component-rendering them useless for anyone who really wants to get a grip on, say, s.p.a.ce travel or nanotechnology. On the other hand, they may be treated the way W. C. Fields treated golf when he spoke of it as a good walk spoiled-that is, the books are seen as fictional narratives cluttered up with too much esoteric geek material, when they should have stuck to describing the social and s.e.xual interactions among Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, only in futuristic clothing.

Jules Verne, a granddaddy of science fiction-in its broadest sense-on the paternal side, and the author of such works as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, was horrified by the liberties taken by H. G. Wells, who, unlike Verne, did not confine himself to machines that were within the realm of possibility-such as the submarine-but created other machines-such as the time machine-that were quite obviously not. "Il invente!" Jules Verne is said to have said, with vast disapproval. He himself invented too, it must be said. But not quite so wildly.

Before the term science fiction became generally used, in America, in the 1930s, during the golden age of bug-eyed monsters and girls in bra.s.s bra.s.sieres, stories such as H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds were labelled scientific romances. In both terms-scientific romance and science fiction-the science element is a qualifier. The nouns are romance and fiction, and the word fiction covers a lot of ground.

In the mid-twentieth century we got into the habit of calling all examples of long prose fiction "novels," and of measuring them by standards used to evaluate one particular kind of long prose fiction, namely the kind that treats of individuals embedded in a realistically described social milieu. This convention emerged with the work of Daniel Defoe-who tried to pa.s.s his inventions off as true-story journalism-and that of Samuel Richardson and f.a.n.n.y Burney and Jane Austen during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and which was then developed by George Eliot and Charles d.i.c.kens and Flaubert and Tolstoy, and many more, in the mid- and late-nineteenth century.

This kind of work is found superior if it has so-called "round" characters-characters with psychological complications and moods and introspections-rather than "flat" ones who run around having narrow escapes and shooting people, round ones being thought to have more of what we call "depth." Anything that doesn't fit this mode has been shoved into an area of lesser solemnity called "genre fiction," and it is here that the spy thriller and the crime story and the adventure story and the supernatural tale and the science fiction, however excellently written, must reside, sent to their rooms-as it were-for the misdemeanour of being enjoyable in what is considered a meretricious way. They invent, and we all know they invent, at least up to a point, and they are therefore not about Real Life, which ought to lack coincidences and weirdness and action/adventure-unless the adventure story is about war, of course, where anything goes-and they are therefore not solid.

The novel proper has always laid claim to a certain kind of truth-the truth about human nature, or how people really behave with all their clothes on except in the bedroom-that is, under observable social conditions. The "genres," it is thought, have other designs on us. They want to entertain, as opposed to rubbing our noses in the daily grit produced by the daily grind. Unhappily for realistic novelists, the larger reading public likes being entertained. There's a poverty-stricken writer in George Gissing's masterpiece, New Grub Street, who commits suicide after the failure of his slice-of-life realistic novel ent.i.tled Mr. Bailey, Grocer. New Grub Street came out at the height of the craze for such adventure romance novelties as H. Rider Haggard's She and the scientific romances of H. G. Wells, and Mr. Bailey, Grocer-if it had been a real novel-would have had a thin time of it with reviewers and readers alike. If you think this can't happen now, take a look at the sales figures of Yann Martel's Life of Pi-pure adventure-romance-and Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, ditto, and the long-running vampiramas of Anne Rice and the Twilight series, and Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife. All of them are romances rather than realistic novels proper.

The setting of the realistic novel is Middle Earth, and the middle of Middle Earth is, roughly, the middle cla.s.s, and the hero and heroine are usually within the desirable norms. As publishers' readers so often say, "We like these people." Grotesque variations on the desirable norms appear, of course, but they take the form not of evil talking clams or werewolves or s.p.a.ce aliens but of folks with sad character defects or strange disabilities or no incomes. Ideas about-for instance-untried forms of social organization are introduced, if at all, through conversations among the characters, or in the form of diary or reverie, rather than being dramatized, as they are in the utopia and the dystopia.

In novels proper the central characters are placed for us in social s.p.a.ce by being given parents and relatives, however unsatisfactory or dead these may be at the outset of the story. These central characters don't just appear out of thin air as fully grown adults, the way adventure heroes are likely to do (Sherlock Holmes has no parents); rather they are provided with a past, a history. The past accounts in part for the character's inner problems, or conflicts, thus making him or her round enough to pa.s.s muster. This sort of fiction concerns itself with the conscious waking state, and if a man changes into an arthropod in such a book, he'll do so only in a nightmare.

It is up to fantasists such as Franz Kafka and Gogol to give us masterpieces in which-for instance-a man's nose becomes separated from his face and takes up independent life as a government bureaucrat, as in Gogol's "The Nose," or Gregor wakes up one morning to find he has become a beetle, as in Kafka's The Metamorphosis. (There is some academic literature devoted to what sort of beetle; I myself am inclined to think it was not a beetle as such but a house centipede.) Thus, not all prose fictions are novels in the stick-to-realism sense of the word. A book can be a prose fiction without being a novel. The Pilgrim's Progress, although a prose narrative and a fiction, was not intended as a "novel"; when it was written, such things did not exactly exist. It's a romance-a story about the adventures of a hero-coupled with an allegory-the stages of the Christian life. (It's also one of the precursors of science fiction, although not often recognized as such.) Here are some other prose-fiction forms that are not novels proper: The confession. The symposium. The Menippean satire, or anatomy. The extended fable. And what, exactly, is Don Quixote? And what is Moby-d.i.c.k? They're stories, or they contain stories, but are they novels? In fact, the further back we stand from prose fictions-taking them all in, as it were-the fewer of them are "novels" in the nineteenth-century-realist sense of that word.

Nathaniel Hawthorne deliberately called some of his fictions "romances," to distinguish them from novels. What he might have been thinking of was the tendency of the romance form to use a somewhat more obvious degree of patterning than the novel was thought to do-the blond heroine versus her dark alter ego, for instance, as in Ivanhoe and the romances of Fenimore Cooper. The French have two words for the short story-conte and nouvelle-"the tale" and "the news"-and this is a useful distinction. The tale can be set anywhere, and can move into realms that are off-limits for the realistic novel-into the cellars and attics of the mind, where figures that can appear in novels only as dreams and fantasies take actual shape and walk the earth. "The news," however, is news of us; it's the daily news, as in "daily life." There can be car crashes and s.h.i.+pwrecks in the news, but there are not likely to be any Frankenstein monsters; not, that is, until someone in "daily life" actually manages to create one.

Fiction can of course bring us other kinds of news; it can speak, as does Yeats's golden nightingale, of "what is past, or pa.s.sing, or to come." When you're writing about what is to come, you could be engaged in journalism of the dire-warning sort-elect that b.a.s.t.a.r.d, build that dam, drop that bomb, burn that carbon, and all h.e.l.l will break loose. Such journalism is expected to confine its range to observable factors. In the nineteenth century, Tennyson wrote a poem called "Locksley Hall," which appeared to predict-among other things-the age of airplanes, and which contains the line "For I dip't into the future, far as human eye can see"; but no one can really do that. The future can never be truly predicted because there are too many variables. You can, however, dip into the present, which contains the seeds of what might become the future. As William Gibson of Neuromancer and cyber-punk fame said, "The future is already with us, it's just unevenly distributed." So, in forecast journalism, you can look at a lamb and make an educated guess, such as, "If nothing unexpected happens to this lamb along the way, it will most likely become (a) a sheep or (b) your dinner." But you will probably exclude (c) a giant wool-covered monster that will crush New York.

However, if your writing about the future isn't forecast journalism, it will most likely be something people will call either science fiction or speculative fiction. The terms are fluid, as we've seen. Some use speculative fiction as an umbrella covering science fiction and all its hyphenated forms-science-fiction fantasy and so forth-and others choose the reverse. SF novels of course can set themselves in parallel imagined realities, or long ago, and/or on planets far away. But all these locations have something in common: they don't exist, and their non-existence is of a different order than the non-existence of the realistic novel's Bobs and Carols and Teds and Alices.

Here are some of the things SF narratives can do that "novels" as usually defined cannot do.

They can explore the consequences of new and proposed technologies in graphic ways by showing them as fully operational. We've always been good at letting cats out of bags and genies out of bottles and plagues out of Pandora's Box: we just haven't been very good at putting them back in again. These stories in their darker modes are all versions of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," in which the apprentice starts up some of the sorcerer's magic but doesn't know how to turn it off. They may help us to decide whether such apprentices could maybe use a little supervision.

They can explore the nature and limits of what it means to be human in very explicit ways, by pus.h.i.+ng the human envelope as far as it will go in the direction of the not-quite-human. Are the robots in apek's R.U.R. human? They make a good case for their rights. Are the Stepford Wives human? How about the replicants in Blade Runner, or the beast folk in The Island of Doctor Moreau?

These are scary or creepy examples. But on the other hand, such quasi-humans can take more positive forms that help us to understand and navigate differences. In such fictions, the characters may diverge from the standard human model-Data in Star Trek, the gifted mutants in John Wyndham's The Chrysalids and the one in Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, the Martians in The Martian Chronicles, Octavia Butler's Oankali-but they are viewed sympathetically.

SF narratives can also interrogate social organization by showing what things might be like if we rearranged them. Sometimes they are used primarily as a way of reconsidering gender structures. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, John Wyndham's Consider Her Ways, W. H. Hudson's A Crystal Age, the works of Joanna Russ, Sheri Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country, and many of Ursula K. Le Guin's stories have this end in view.

But SF has also abounded in a subgenre we might call "economic SF"-Bellamy's industrial romance, Looking Backward, which antic.i.p.ated the credit card, is one of these, but so is William Morris's socialistic News from Nowhere. Such stories, whatever else they may be doing in the way of redesigning women's clothing (s.e.xier, less s.e.xy) or putting food on the table (more, less; tastier, horrible), have as their central focus the production and distribution of goods and the allocation of economic benefits among various social cla.s.ses.

In this respect they may use SF conventions as a semi-disguise or decorative front whereby they may criticize the present-day governments and inst.i.tutions of the writer's own society when overt criticism might prove dangerous or fatal. Yevgeny Zamyatin, an early Bolshevik who saw Big Brother coming, used SF for this purpose in We, and Judith Merril and her generation of writer friends took to SF during the McCarthy era in the United States because they felt that bald statements of dissent would invite retribution.

Finally, SF stories can explore the outer reaches of the imagination by taking us boldly where no man has gone before, or indeed ever. Thus the s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p, thus the inner realms of Fantastic Voyage, thus the cybers.p.a.ce trips of William Gibson, and thus the trips between two realities in the film The Matrix-this last, by the way, an adventure romance with strong overtones of Christian allegory, and thus more closely related to The Pilgrim's Progress than to Pride and Prejudice.

In the process of such explorations, SF may create patterns that purport to depict the relations.h.i.+p of man to the universe, a depiction that takes us in the direction of religion and ultimately into the preoccupations of metaphysics and mythologies-the dispositions of G.o.ds, spirits, and demons, the origins of the universe and of the people or ent.i.ties that comprise its societies, the longed-for or feared spiritual landscapes or territories, and the nature of psychic enemies. Again, this is something that can happen within the conventions of fictional realism only through conversations, reveries, stories told within stories, hallucinations, or dreams.

I'm far from the first commentator to note that science fiction is where theologically linked phenomena and reasonable facsimiles of them went after Paradise Lost. The form has often been used as a way of acting out a theological doctrine, as-for instance-Dante's Divine Comedy was once used. I'm thinking especially of C. S. Lewis's "s.p.a.ce trilogy," Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength, which rings the changes on the Fall of Man, Original Sin, and the possibilities of redemption, but there are by now many other examples. The religious resonances in such films as Star Wars are more than obvious.

Why this migration of the West's more recent founding mythologies-our once-essential core stories of the Judeo-Christian era-from Earth to Planet X? Possibly because-as a society-we no longer believe in the old religious furniture, or not enough to make it part of our waking "realistic" life. If you have a conversation with the Devil and admit to it, you're liable to end up in a psychiatric ward, not sizzling at the stake. Supernatural creatures with wings and burning bushes that speak are unlikely to be encountered in a novel about stockbrokers unless the stockbrokers have been taking mind-altering substances. But such creatures are thoroughly at home on Planet X.

So that's why Heaven and h.e.l.l-or at least some of the shapes their inhabitants have traditionally taken-have gone to Planet X. A lot of the other G.o.ds and heroes have gone there as well. They've moved shop because they're acceptable to us there, whereas they wouldn't be here. On Planet X they can take part in a plausible story-plausible, that is, within its own otherworldly parameters. And many of us are more than willing to engage with them there because-say some theorists-our own deep inner selves still contain the archetypal patterns that produced them.

NOTES.

1. Stanislaw Lem, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, originally published in Cracow, 1971; Avon translation by Michael Kandel and Christine Rose. Quotation, page 10.

2. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, (Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 49.

3. M. R. James: see, for instance, Tales of an Antiquary.

4. Donovan's Brain is by Curt Siodmak. The Kraken Wakes is by John Wyndham.

5. Jane Austen: Thus the frisson produced by such t.i.tles as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

6. Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (Oxford University Press, 2009).

7. Season-linked story cycle: For a good late-Victorian example, see William Morris, The Earthly Paradise.

8. Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, from the film of that name.

9. Yeats's nightingale: in "Sailing to Byzantium."

10. Judith Merril: Told to this author.

Dire Cartographies:.

The Roads to Ustopia.

What we call places are stable locations with unstable converging forces.

REBECCA SOLNIT, Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas.

... after WWII utopia was no longer just a synonym for naivete. It was dangerous. Now, decades further on, in a new century and a new millennium, earnest utopian thought and earnest utopians are a glowing ember at best, and utopia's legion failures seem to suggest that the best course of action would be to crush it-snuff it for good.

J. C. HALLMAN, In Eutopia.

This chapter is about literary utopias and dystopias, and how it came to pa.s.s that I found myself writing about them, and then-many years later-attempting something in that form myself. Ustopia is a word I made up by combining utopia and dystopia-the imagined perfect society and its opposite-because, in my view, each contains a latent version of the other.

The "dire" might at first glance appear to be connected only to the obverse or dystopic side of this coin, where unpleasantness prevails, though most utopias viewed slantwise-from the point of view of people who don't fit into their high standards of perfection-are equally dire. But before expanding on that notion, I'll begin with the second word of my t.i.tle: cartographies.

Cartography is map-drawing, and the brain is, among other things, a map-making ent.i.ty. Not only our brains, but also those of other animals with brains. And not only the brains of other animals with brains: even the lowly slime mould, entirely devoid of a central nervous system, "maps" its adjacent s.p.a.ce, figuring out-for instance-the closest route to enjoyable foods. (It prefers oatmeal.) From our earliest days, as soon as we can crawl around on the floor, we are inscribing maps of our surroundings onto the neural pathways in our brains and-reciprocally-inscribing our own tracks, markings, and namings and claimings onto the landscape itself. Snails make trails, and so do beavers, and so do tree-scratching bears and hydrant-marking dogs, and so-quintessentially-do we. We're almost as good at finding the shortest path to enjoyable foods as slime moulds are, although our choice may not be oatmeal.

With every map there's an edge-a border between the known and the unknown. In old medieval and early Renaissance maps, the edges were where the monsters were drawn-the sea serpents and many-headed hydras, which were, as we say, off the map. Monsters live under the bed when you're little because you can't see under the bed when you're actually in the bed. And that's what's scary about darkness for a lot of people: the unknown. The known is finite, the unknown is infinite: anything at all may lurk in it. Grendel, the monster in Beowulf, is termed-in John Gardner's reworking of him-"earth rim roamer" and "walker of the world's weird wall." That's where monsters live-at the edges, at the borders. Monsters also live at the edges of our consciousness-during the day and in stable times, that is. They take full possession of our field of vision only when we're "asleep" or entranced in some way, as suggested by the t.i.tle of Goya's enigmatic engraving of 1799, The Sleep of Reason Breeds Monsters.

Why do we so frequently put monsters at the edges of the maps, or under the bed, and also-in some of its forms-in stories of the adventure-romance type? As Roberto Cala.s.so sagely notes in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, heroes need monsters in order to establish their heroic credentials through combat, but monsters most emphatically do not need heroes. And once the monsters are slain, the heroes die as well, to be replaced by urban planning with its crisp maps of the known, and then, in the shadow world hidden or possibly pushed aside by those maps, by more monsters, who are endlessly re-created so that yet more heroes-detectives, spies, police officers, secret agents, and their like-may do battle with them.

The edges of the maps-out of our sight, beyond the known world-were also where the writers of early utopias set their tales. During the Middle Ages, utopias were not devised much, since the perfect society had been postponed to the life after death or until after the millennium or the second coming; as the 1930s Wobbly folk song put it, "There'll be pie in the sky when you die." There was a no-place called The Land of c.o.c.kaigne, where the walls were made of pies and the s.h.i.+ngles of cakes, s.e.x was unrestricted, and laziness and gluttony were available to all; but although a paradise of sorts, it was-officially at any rate-a fools' paradise.

However, once the Renaissance and then the early modern age got going, utopia made a comeback. Like Plato's seminal Atlantis and the Avalon of Arthurian romances, these utopias were typically located on islands to be found just out of reach of the real maps, like the utopia in the book of that name by Thomas More. Even the deserted island of Shakespeare's The Tempest contains a utopia: the Golden Age society described by the kindly character Gonzalo, where no one has to work, where all are free and equal by decree of the king-a slight contradiction there-and where there is no crime or war. (The dystopia latent in The Tempest is the very same physical location viewed through the eyes of Caliban, its original inhabitant.) In Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, the utopias are comic and satirical, but they are similarly located on islands, each of which is provided with a realistic-looking map by the fictional wandering and tale-telling sailor, Lemuel Gulliver-in the tradition of an earlier sea captain and an earlier map, those in More's Utopia.

But then real mapping filled in previously "undiscovered" areas of the ocean, thus ruling out islands and driving utopia-dystopia further into the unknown. First it went underground, to the traditional location of under-the-hill fairylands and worlds of the dead and the kinds of mountain-king dwarfs we find in Tolkien and in the folklore he drew on. (The underworld is also the unknown realm of choice for various concocted nineteenth-century gnome-lands and fairylands, that of Lewis Carroll's Alice among them.) Such cavern sagas as Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Age and Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth were placed in vast hollows beneath the Earth's crust, replete with surviving prehistoric beasts and giant ferns.

But then, once the Earth's structure had been more fully described by geologists, ustopia moved to unexplored hinterlands, where we find H. Rider Haggard's lost city of Kor in his novel She, or the Shangri-La of James Hilton's Lost Horizon, or H. G. Wells's "Country of the Blind." But these locations also became too thoroughly mapped, and ustopia had to relocate again.

For a while the other planets in the solar system were possibilities, though Mars and Venus and the Moon had to be given up once we knew what was actually on them, such as no intelligent life. The final move was to an outer s.p.a.ce far beyond our system, or to a parallel universe, or to a past so long ago that all traces of it have been obliterated; or to the future, also an unknown.

In the previous chapter, "Burning Bushes," I suggested that the literary offspring of theology, such as angels and devils, moved to outer s.p.a.ce because we no longer believed in their doctrinal underpinnings sufficiently to make these creatures plausible in realistic narratives set on Earth. But maybe this emigration was also caused by a real estate problem. We filled the unknown s.p.a.ces with us-with ourselves, and our names and roads and maps. We tidied up, we gentrified, we put in streetlights; so the rowdy and uncontrollable bohemians of the imagination-always dwellers in the penumbras-had to move on.

Maps are not only about s.p.a.ce, they're also about time: maps are frozen journeys. They may be journeys from the past: places we've been, or whose history we're studying. (Who can begin to comprehend the Second World War without those arrow-covered maps?) Or they can be journeys of the present, helping you to find your way to the nearest organic coffee shop via the "route" b.u.t.ton on your GPS-enabled phone. Or they may be journeys of the future, by the aid of which you plan your next vacation-how you'll get to the island of your dreams, how long that will take, where you'll go while you're there, how you'll get back.

The many fictional inner journeys available to us-those that unfold in imaginary places-also come equipped with maps. Think of the mandatory maps at the fronts of those 1930s country-house murder mysteries, with the library and the conservatory and the servants' wing, or the maps included in Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea Trilogy and those in The Lord of the Rings; and more, and more. Indeed, a great many more. It does seem to be a rule as well that when there are wars or murders involved-anything requiring strategic planning and the movement of opponents or aggressors toward their targets-maps are a conceptual help, not only for the reader but for the writer.

Indeed it would seem that quite a few writers think cartographically, especially writers about imaginary places. If you're writing about a real city, a well-known one, the maps of it already exist and the reader can look them up, but if you're writing about an unknown location, they don't. The writing of Treasure Island began with Stevenson's drawing of a map, as an effort to amuse a young visitor. It was not until after he'd sketched in some buried treasure and a few landmarks that Stevenson began writing the story proper, and the book's journey began with that very same map being discovered in the sea chest of dead pirate Billy Bones.

As ustopia is by definition elsewhere, it is almost always bracketed by two journeys: the one that transports the tale-teller to the other place and the one that transports him (or her) back so he can deliver his report to us. Thus the writer of the book always has to come up with a mode of transport. When utopias were placed on islands, the journey was a simple matter of a sea voyage, and then of some sort of rescue by boat. Journeys underground involved tunnels, and ropes, and falling down holes, and the sudden breaking through of stone walls; return journeys took luck, scrambling up cave walls, the following of an animal that knew an escape route, or a version of Ariadne's thread. Locations in outer s.p.a.ce necessitated s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps.

As for journeys to the future, which require transport not through s.p.a.ce but through time, one could always fall back on that medieval gimmick, the dream vision, a form of psychic teleportation; or some kind of time machine; or a long sleep, like Sleeping Beauty's or Rip Van Winkle's. (Looking Backward and A Crystal Age both use this one: in the latter, our time-travel reporter bangs his head and wakes up far in the future, charmingly covered with little tree roots.) It's this convention that Woody Allen is satirizing in his film Sleeper when he crawls out of a freezer covered in tinfoil.

Once "the future" became an established location, writers could feel free to jettison the travel episode and the "reporter" figure, and to plop the reader right down in the midst of things. "It was a bright cold day in April," begins Nineteen Eighty-Four, "and the clocks were striking thirteen." The "reporter" function exists in the book not as a person but in two texts within it: a book forbidden by the ruling Party of 1984, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, by Party arch-enemy Emmanuel Goldstein-who may or may not exist-and "The Principles of Newspeak," an essay on language-as-control that we read after the end of the story proper. It is this essay by an unknown reporter-in my belief-that travels to our own time and lets us know how things turned out.

In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the "reporter" is replaced by the "Savage," a man from outside the borders of the highly organized tech utopia whose views on life may be thought to have more in common with those of the reader-or at least the reader of the 1930s, when Brave New World was written. The Savage plays, in effect, a tragic Caliban to all the cheery Mirandas and hidden Prosperos in the book-the perfumed anti-pregnancy free-s.e.x girls, the largely unseen string-pullers that direct and regiment the society in order to protect people from themselves.

Reporters and messages naturally require some means of transmission. Perhaps no other genre has so concerned itself with information systems as has SF, especially that of the ustopian kind. Various methods have been employed by various authors. There are diaries and journals left by the literary descendants of Robinson Crusoe in the hope that someone in the future may read them; there are strange ma.n.u.scripts found in copper cylinders; there are metal books, and crystal encoding systems, and hieroglyphs that need deciphering. There are language barriers to be overcome, there are catastrophes resulting in ma.s.s memory and information loss-Stanislaw Lem's Memoirs Found in a Bathtub postulates a worldwide meltdown caused by a nan.o.bioform that eats paper, for example, thus creating the equivalent of a worldwide library-burning.

Some writers just skip the message-transmission system and resort to straight third-person narration, or allow the narrator to address us from limbo. But any writer of ustopias has to answer three necessary questions: where is it, when is it, and-in relation to maps-what shape is it? For unless we readers can believe in the ustopia as a potentially mappable place, we will not suspend our disbelief willingly.

Flying warriors; princesses and knights, by Harold L. Atwood: I came early to maps, though not altogether by choice. My older brother was an inveterate map-maker. Not only did he devise follow-the-clue maps for me, but he drew many maps of imaginary places on other planets. The lands he described were often islands, as is the real estate for sale on the virtual-reality site Second Life-islands are more comprehensible and easily defined than countries with contingent borders. While mapping Neptune and Venus, my brother also took to mapping the very island we were then living on, naming each bay, swamp, promontory, peninsula, and offsh.o.r.e island. Once those places had names, it was, strangely enough, easier to find your way to them.

Naming is of course an aid to memory: attach a name to a place and you have a proto-map. The physical maps are only the outward and visible manifestations of inner and neurological maps-the things drawn or, in the case of the northern Canadian Inuit, carved, in three dimensions on pieces of wood that could float if your kayak tipped. And, as with anything brainiac, practise makes bigger: those who study the brains of taxi drivers in London, where apprentice taxi drivers have to learn the city by memory and then pa.s.s a difficult test, report that the mapping areas of the taxi drivers' brains-those parts having to do with spatial orientation and visualization-are larger and denser than those in the brains of the rest of us.

In addition to being, almost always, a mapped location, ustopia is also a state of mind, as is every place in literature of whatever kind. As Mephistopheles in Marlowe's play Doctor Faustus tells us, h.e.l.l is not only a physical s.p.a.ce. "Why this is h.e.l.l, nor am I out of it," he says: h.e.l.l hath no limits, nor is circ.u.mscrib'd In one self place; but where we are is h.e.l.l, And where h.e.l.l is, there must we ever be.

Or, to cite a more positive version, from Milton's Paradise Lost: ... then wilt thou not be loath To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess A Paradise within thee, happier farr.

In literature, every landscape is a state of mind, but every state of mind can also be portrayed by a landscape. And so it is with ustopia.

How did I myself come to create my own ustopias-these not-exactly places, which are anywhere but nowhere, and which are both mappable locations and states of mind?

It was an indirect journey. I'd decided that I was a writer when I was sixteen, after spontaneously generating a pretty bad poem that I thought was pretty good. I was in the twelfth grade at the time, without a living-writer role model in sight. I did not have the foggiest notion of how to go about being a writer, though it was clear to me that I would need a day job, at least at first, since even such an optimistic person as myself could not expect to burst into best-sellerdom at once.

Our generation did do some writing in school, but it was in the form of essays, or else grammar and composition. We were not encouraged to write fiction and poetry, although we did read a lot of these. Should we be overtaken by the Muse, we could always publish the results in the school yearbook, if we had no shame.

After taking a couple of false turns-luckily, only in my head-I elected to go to university after all. (I had, briefly and madly, decided I would support myself by writing True Romance stories. This seemed easy enough, as they were all basically some variation of Wuthering Heights, in which the girl wrongly falls for the guy with the motorcycle instead of the one with the steady job at the shoe store. But I found I couldn't do this: as with any kind of writing, you somehow have to believe in it yourself or it isn't convincing.) Then I had a short period of thinking I might become a journalist. But a second cousin who was in fact a journalist-he'd been dredged up by my parents in order to discourage me about the newspaper life and herd me in the direction of higher education-told me that women journalists only ever wrote the ladies' pages and the obituaries, and my-by then-sn.o.bby and bohemian self cringed in horror.

Off to university I duly went; but after four years of Honours English, the question of what to do next once more became a pressing one. By this time I was if anything even more bohemian, and was already a coffee-house reader of my still rather terrible poetry, so I thought I should go to London, or possibly to Paris, and live in a c.o.c.kroach-infested garret, and write masterpieces while gnawing crusts of bread and, if I was really up to it, drinking absinthe. But I was again headed off by my benevolent elders: I was urged to apply for a scholars.h.i.+p to Harvard, where-I was a.s.sured-I would probably be able to get more writing done than I would while s.h.i.+vering in the garret and would anyway come out with a job ticket, and therefore be able to write my deathless masterpieces during the long, leisurely summer vacations known to be enjoyed by college professors.

So I decided to postpone the absinthe-drinking, and I did get the scholars.h.i.+p, and I soon found myself in the land of my ancestors, which-in part-is Puritan New England. There, beginning in 1961, I studied Victorian Literature-ask me anything about the Freudian implications of Edward Lear's poem "The Pobble That Has No Toes" and you will receive a long and pedantic answer. This was a time when Victorian literature was just beginning to recover from the disdain heaped upon it by the modernist likes of Lytton Strachey and T. S. Eliot; when the Pre-Raphaelite paintings that were the vogue in the late 1800s were stacked in the back rooms of the Fogg Museum, having not yet achieved their present-day apotheosis as picture postcards; and when Oscar Wilde's p.r.o.nouncement on d.i.c.kens-"One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing"-was the general literary opinion. The serious, indeed the orthodox thing to study was the metaphysical poets, like John Donne, or the contemporaries of Shakespeare, like Webster and Marlowe. But I have always had a less than orthodox side.

In addition to the Victorians, I took courses in American Literature and Civilization because I was told it was my "gap"-one I needed to fill in order to write the required comprehensive exams. We hadn't heard much about Cotton Mather or John Winthrop or "The Day of Doom" by Michael Wigglesworth up in Canada, worse luck. But that gap was soon filled: ask me anything about the Salem Witch Trials and the rules of spectral evidence, and you will receive an even longer and more pedantic answer.

Being a confirmed rummager, I enjoyed all of this meandering around in the sidebars of literary history, even though I was not allowed into the Lamont Library, where all the modern poetry was kept, on account of being a girl; but I compensated in the stacks of the Widener, which had everything you might want to know about demonology. In those stacks there were more obscure books than you could ever hope to find elsewhere, even on the Internet today, and I whiled away many a misspent hour reading about things that were none of my business-the Widener stacks being a much bigger version of the book-filled cellar of my parents' house where I used to avoid doing my homework.

Having duly pa.s.sed my Orals, I had to decide on a thesis topic. Dreaded quest! Your thesis was supposed to be about something that hadn't yet been, as they say, done, and when it came to the major writers, such topics seemed few and far between.

It was now that my earlier reading in non-canonical literature came to my aid. At first I thought I would write about W. H. Hudson, whose lyrical novel, Green Mansions, seemed worthy of investigation. In it there is an otherworldly girl called Rima who belongs to an anthropological group of one, and can talk to birds and animals, and gets burnt up in a giant Tree-of-Life by hostile Indians. But I soon expanded my scope to include a line of literary descent that led from the earlier Scottish writer George MacDonald-author of, among other things, At the Back of the North Wind, which had captivated me as a child-through H. Rider Haggard's highly influential book She, all the way to the non-realistic prose fictions of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. I should point out that at that time no one of any academic respectability was paying any attention to this kind of writing, or to "science fiction" and its related forms or subforms, such as fantasy and ustopias. Lewis and Tolkien had come out of academia, but they had not yet been accepted back into it as writers, so I was on my own. However, Marshall McLuhan's famous dictum "Art is what you can get away with" hadn't been lost on me, and I saw no reason why it shouldn't apply to Ph.D. theses as well.

I called my thesis "The English Metaphysical Romance" because the books I was studying included other-than-human beings and treated themes that were, in origin and in subtext, theological in nature. Someone once said that such works could only have been produced by Anglicans, no longer Catholic but not exactly Protestant either: the metaphysical romance was where the "real presence" went-the magic, transformational part of the Eucharist changed bread and wine into flesh and blood-once the Anglicans had renounced its factuality and turned it into a symbol.