Owen Percy
In the last four decades Margaret Atwood has gone from the Queen of CanLit—trying in 1972 to articulate the “national habit of mind” (13) of 30 million Canadians in Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature—to the planet’s reigning “doyenne of dystopia” (Grubisic “Astounding” par. 1) in her exploration of our here-and-now world’s speculative and futuristic others. In novels like The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Oryx and Crake (2003), and The Year of the Flood (2009), Atwood plots her own vision of a planet and a civilization overrun by corporate and ecological malfeasance and blind(ing) greed. More recently, with the publication of her non-fiction study In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination in 2011, she aspires to collect and articulate the theses of the increasingly unquantifiable field of science fiction (SF) through a process of intelligent taxonomy and convincing conviction. Like Survival, In Other Worlds is as undeniably fruitful and provocative as it is frustrating, broad, impossible, and terrifying. In her introduction, though, Atwood makes sure to cover her tracks and to establish her parameters clearly: “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” (1). It is, rather, a subjective examination of the kind of literature that has come most clearly to define the ennui, malaise, and anxious je ne sais quoi of the decades around and since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). If it is true that “[o]f recent years, [North] American society has moved much closer to the conditions necessary for a takeover of its own power structures by an anti-democratic and repressive government” (Atwood, In Other Worlds 90), then Atwood’s focus in In Other Worlds is on the kind of writing, according to Bruce Sterling, that “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” (qtd. in Atwood, In Other Worlds 8). Atwood is. And she assumes that we are as well—the “certain sensibility” being that of general anxiousness about our civilizational being-in-the-world as the world itself begins to crumble in the form of its economic, political, and cultural institutions.
This essay, after Atwood, will examine the prophetic promises of two early, generically foundational SF texts as they have been reinterpreted in two contemporary CanLit novels that follow the Atwoodian shift from survival in/as CanLit to survival in/as planetary civilization writ large. Ronald Wright’s A Scientific Romance (1997) and Michael Murphy’s A Description of the Blazing World (2011) construct their own shadowy versions of the future on the abandoned foundations of other worlds conceived of by SF writers who have come before them. Both texts are postmodern novels about the reliability of text and documentation, the act of writing as a means of fending off mortality, loneliness, and silence, and the always-impending collapse of the institutions that we still hold dear as natural, neutral, authoritative, and objective, despite all evidence to the contrary since the early to mid-twentieth century. Wright argues in his 2004 CBC Massey Lectures, A Short History of Progress, that, in the current civilizational moment, “[o]ur practical faith in progress has ramified and hardened into an ideology … [that] is blind to certain flaws in its credentials” (4), and that “the engine of capitalism” (123) has in fact culminated in what Zsuzsi Gartner has more recently recognized as “the chaos of capitalism run amuck [sic]” (4); that is, the era of materialistic Jamesonian late capitalism embodied by transnational and neoliberal economic initiatives like NAFTA and its kin. Tellingly, in her 2008 Massey Lectures Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, Atwood herself explores the millennia-old historical and cultural roots of the current global economic crises born of the “opening” of the markets since the 1970s, undoubtedly informing her discussion of what she calls “economic SF”—texts that “have as their central focus the production and distribution of goods and the allocation of economic benefits among various social classes” (In Other Worlds 63). It should be noted here that Wright and Murphy do not proffer “economic SF” texts at all—they imagine what we might call “post-economic SF,” as the worlds they (re)construct imply the culmination and collapse of civilizational systems—of economy, of class, of government—altogether, emerging directly from our collective refusal to recognize the warnings of each of their respective SF source-worlds. Both A Scientific Romance and A Description of the Blazing World acknowledge and meditate on, albeit in different ways, our collective failures to learn and prosper from the speculations of earlier writers who have already imagined the other-worldly futures upon which we seem increasingly to be verging because of our blinding belief in the stability of our markets and institutions.
A Scientific Romance takes its cue and its narrative vehicle from H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. Wright’s protagonist is David Lambert, an Oxford-educated archaeologist suffering from bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or mad cow disease) in the last days of 1999. Lambert comes into possession of a mysterious letter claiming to be from the late Wells’ solicitors, inviting its reader to a clandestine meeting at midnight on the crest of the twenty-first century. Lambert goes to the appointed meeting place and discovers Wells’ own unlikely gift to the future: a functional time machine that sends Lambert five hundred years into his future to wander a tropical, desolate, and deserted England. As Lambert comes to realize and understand the inevitable end to the history, culture, and civilization from which he has travelled, he also begins to recognize the implications of his escape from it, and from his responsibility as a former citizen of the here-and-now in which we must read the book. The diptych narratives of A Description of the Blazing World present readers with even more Wellses with which to reckon: a troubled teenage boy struggling with the disappearance of his war-correspondent father is sent to spend the summer with his arch-nemesis older brother in Toronto. Then, in the midst of the major blackout of August 2003, the boy stumbles across a copy of Margaret Cavendish’s 1666 utopian fantasy novella A Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World (henceforth just The Blazing World), widely considered to be one of the first works of science fiction in English. He takes to the streets with his tape recorder to document what he is certain is “the coming Super Death” (Murphy 120)—an apocalypse that will birth a Cavendishian new world that might in fact blaze with the natural enlightenment of a new civilization that has learned from its historical other’s mistakes.
These two novels set themselves in the aporia between our recognizable and contemporary here-and-now and the terrifyingly recognizable other worlds that might follow what they both see as our impending civilizational implosion—“our own planet in a future” (Atwood, In Other Worlds 5). Both novels, too, position themselves in urgently declining millennium-era presents in order to consider the comfort and confidence with which we have been living in spite of the warnings issued to us by The Time Machine and The Blazing World—foundational texts in the SF genre. A Scientific Romance and A Description of the Blazing World proffer, in this respect, a kind of textual “syncreticity” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 14) that does not resist or refuse their canonical precedents but redraws our attention to the prophetic possibilities of the source texts themselves. They portray the potential future others of our own contemporary civilizational environments by, in fact, looking backwards into the distorted mirrors of what Atwood might call Wellsian and Cavendishian “ustopias.” According to Atwood, the term “ustopia”—a portmanteau of “utopia” and “dystopia”—signifies “the imagined perfect society and its opposite” on the assumption that “each contains a latent version of the other” (In Other Worlds 66). And although, again in shades of Survival, “Atwood’s coinage of ‘ustopia’ is presented as though the last half century of scholarship about dystopian literature never happened” (Grubisic “Margaret Atwood” par. 3), the term’s elasticity of signification allows it to stand simply for the concept of a geographical and/or temporal “elsewhere” (Atwood, In Other Worlds 71). Like the very ustopic fictions by Wells and Cavendish that their speculations draw upon, A Scientific Romance and A Description of the Blazing World are the “diaries and journals left by the literary descendants of Robinson Crusoe in the hope that someone in the future may read them” (Atwood, In Other Worlds 73). They insist, though, in a way their source texts do not, that the ustopic future is urgently, irrefutably now, and that we must address its potentialities if we are to survive it at all.
Both novels engage Atwood’s dystopic doctrine of conceiving of the here-and-now world in terms of the here-and-soon, and both inherently demonstrate our arrogant civilizational defiance of Wells’ and Cavendish’s earlier prophetic prognostications by reinscribing them as monstrous distortions of our (post-NAFTA) present. In their rewritings, Wright and Murphy are not themselves Wellsian or Cavendishian; they do not propose new possibilities for the future, or, really, escapism from the mundane realities of our post-millennium present—what Wright believes to be “our last chance to get the future right” (A Short History 132). In fact, they threaten to deny the future altogether; they turn our attentions again to those who have come speculating before us in order to underline the relative inertia of our civilizational and socio-cultural progress, and to our wilful ignorance of SF’s earlier generic warnings against our self-styled and capital-driven progress toward so-called enlightenment. In other words, the novels “extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near-future that’s half prediction, half satire” (Ursula LeGuin qtd. in Atwood, In Other Worlds 5) and craft satires, both of the texts and the worlds that have come before theirs, and of the dystopias that they have bred. They are fictions that urge us, in fact, to speculate against fiction itself, that is, narratives that draw upon The Time Machine and The Blazing World in order to demonstrate their continued urgent relevance to the crisis-laden present and the possible futures of our other worlds if these visions were to become, horrifyingly, non-fictional.
In borrowing H.G. Wells’ canonical time machine for his own fiction, B.C.-based Richard Wright directly invokes the history and generic connotation of the scientific romance—a genre that flourished in the Victorian era and came to refer predominantly to the work of British writers who used the veil of fiction to speculate upon the potentiality of science, technology, and the future. According to Wright himself, the genre “had two modern descendants: mainstream science fiction, and profound social satire set in nightmare futures” (A Short History 122). Despite receiving a relatively rocky initial reception in 1895, H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine has proven itself to be the most important scientific romance of its (or any other) generation in the British tradition. In it, according to Margaret Drabble, Wells “foresaw the annihilation of our species” and “the inevitable death of our planet” (“Introduction” viii, xix) resulting from the ultimate triumph of capitalistic Darwinian logic. Upon arrival in the year 802,701 A.D., Wells’ nameless Time Traveller initially seems to have stumbled upon a utopian society comprised of diminutive, serene, intellectually simple beings living in an apparent Golden Age wherein there are “no hedges, no signs or proprietary rights, no evidences of agriculture; the whole earth had become a garden” (29), and where the creatures—the Eloi—seem to “spen[d] all their time in playing gently, in bathing in the river, in making love in a half-playful fashion, in eating fruit and sleeping” (40). Indeed, the Eloi world seems initially to be a “social paradise” wherein humanity and nature have achieved harmony and humankind is “engaged in no toil … nor economical struggle” because “all that commerce which constitutes the body of our world, was gone” (30). But what first seems like the perfect culmination of Darwinian evolution soon begins to show traces of its dystopic other as night falls over the Eloi. A second race of beings, the Morlocks, emerge from their subterranean homes in order to terrorize and hunt the passive Eloi, fattened and unable to protect themselves thanks to their labourless evolutionary triumph (which Drabble attributes to “humanity ha[ving] reached a state of tragic degeneracy because at one point it achieved such a level of material comfort that it lost the need to fight for survival” [xiv]). Unsurprisingly, Wells’ Time Traveller sees in this relationship a class allegory mirroring the “social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer” wherein the “Haves pursu[e] pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers, [get] continually adapted to the conditions of their labour” (46–47) before they begin, literally, eating the rich. Wells’ alarming 1895 vision, then, was of “a real aristocracy, armed with a perfected science and working to a logical conclusion the industrial system of today” (The Time Machine 47). That is, Wells’ horrifying ustopia contains in it at once the seeds of injustice, degradation, and collapse of industrial civilization that the story’s narrator acknowledges as “only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end” (87), and is itself erased under a frightening ice age witnessed as the Time Traveller later moves several million years further into the future.
Wells himself, reflecting on his novella in 1931, demonstrated a much more hopeful attitude toward the future of civilization than his predecessors might be said to have adopted from The Time Machine when he admitted to having been informed by the “dreadful lies about the ‘inevitable’ freezing up of the world—and of life and mankind with it” told to him by fin de siècle geologists and scientists who believed at the time that “[t]he whole game of life would be over in a million years or less” (“Preface” 417). How strange it would seem to a late-Victorian reader, then, to have us consider Wells an idealistic optimist today.
In A Scientific Romance, Wright’s David Lambert arrives “After London” in the year 2500 A.D. to “the fox heat of a rainforest…. A new heaven, a new earth” (77) in his city now overrun by the ecosystems of the tropics but completely devoid of living humanity. England’s rivers have “reclaimed their surface rights” (134), the “sea-level has risen several metres … widening the Thames estuary by a mile or so” (77–78), and thick rainforest vegetation obscures most discernible landmarks in the former hub of the Western world. At first, in fact, Lambert hopes against hope that he has landed in what might now be a national park or nature preserve because of the complete and eerie absence of the thriving, bustling London he left. But London is not devoid of life itself; in fact, Lambert soon discovers that it is “spread out below [him] like a promised land” (110) and that the “instinctual clamour of the forest—a skiffle of buzzing, scarping, belching, and sharp cries” relays nature’s message to (old) London’s (new) last human resident: “Your city has been dead for centuries” (97; emphasis added). Being an archaeologist, then, Lambert spends much of his time in speculation about how this civilization—his civilization—came to its end, how “[c]ycles have changed from ice to heat or vice versa not in millennia, but in decades” (88), and how London itself became a tropical Eden. There are enough standing buildings, he believes, “to rule out a bang. But what sort of whimper?” (111). So what happened? “Warming, obviously, as many foresaw. But for the reasons they foresaw? Or something else, something for which we can’t be blamed: an asteroid smacking the planet in the chops; or the world relapsing like a malaria patient into its old sweat and chills?” (Wright, A Scientific Romance 87).
And herein lies the crux of A Scientific Romance as a dystopic speculation about the world on our current civilization’s doorstep: Where Wells is content to imagine a future world whose evolutionary lines are drawn very clearly, Wright employs a protagonist whose vision is less stable and whose consciousness is less secure in its assumptions of how his new here-and-now came to be. In other words, Wright has Lambert asks Wells’ rhetorical questions literally, to us, his readers, fumbling toward whatever whimper is set to fade us into civilizational silence. Most notably, Wright plants the seeds of doubt about the globalization and “free-ness” of our current markets, culture, and economic perspective in the deafening silences that wake Lambert from his slumber in the abandoned Tower of London:
Again and again the enormity of where I am crashes down, stripping me naked in this ancient monument, my home. And the next thought: what chance that the rest of the world is any different? The civilizations of the past were local, feeding on particular ecologies. While one fell, another rose elsewhere. But ours has wrapped itself around the world, its very scale and complexity making it uniquely vulnerable to any global change. It isn’t hard to see the droughts and floods, the failed harvests, the end of trade, the refugees, the desperate measures to control the starving. (97)
The world gone to seed here is in fact recognizably our world in ruins—a ustopia in its marked otherness from the gold standard by which we live today, and one in which Lambert’s out-loud speculations necessarily fall on deaf ears while his textual ones must resonate into our own here-and-now, still lingering in the before before the ustopic fall.
The legacy that Lambert brings with him to his new world (from our here-and-now) is a damning one; he suffers from BSE (though there are suggestions it might in fact be HIV), he is unprepared for the power of the sun (81), and despite befriending an affectionate puma whom he names Graham (101) he is terrified of his solitude. In fact, his very presence in London in the year 2500 A.D. is owing only to his willingness to attempt the impossible as a means of potential suicide out of a world—our world—that has nothing but suffering and hopelessness to offer him. If Lambert’s new world is not itself civilizationally dead, though, neither is it empty or devoid of the traces of its old self. In stumbling upon what he assumes to be a landfill, he reflects upon the inevitable legacy of stuff that the twentieth century has left to its ustopic future:
All those things … Zamfir recordings, yo-yos, xylophones, weedkillers, video games, train sets, televisions, stereos, snuff films, rocket silos, railways, pinball tables, one-armed bandits, oil refineries, nuclear piles, motorhomes, milk cartons, lipsticks, lawnmowers, lava lamps, Kleenex holders, Jacuzzis, hula-hoops, houseboats, gravy boats, golf carts, footballs, fondue sets, drinks trolleys, cameras, bottles, beds, airliners—all those splendid Things that made up the sum of the world, which we had to keep on making and buying to keep ourselves diverted and employed—were just garbage-to-be. Ripped, smelted, sucked, blown from the raddled earth; turned into must-haves, always-wanteds, major advances, can’t-do-withouts. And pouf! a decade later, a season later, it’s ashamed-to-be-seen-in, clapped out, white elephant, obsolete, infra dig, inefficient, passé, and away it goes to the basement or the bushes or the ditch or the bottom of the sea…. Our final century has left more of a mess than our previous million years. (160–61)
Lambert the archaeologist is left to wander the former motorways of England (turfed conveniently and exclusively with what he believes to be a species of weed-choking “Übergras” [173] called Ecolawn that had been in development by “Big Oil and Briggs & Stratton” [142] at the moment of his departure from the twentieth century) and to dig through the detritus of the future, guided only by his own speculations, sparse documents, and overpass graffiti—“civilization’s last comment on itself” (155)—scrawled on the decaying infrastructure of England and charting a spotty history suggestive of our end times: we learn, at the very least, of seasonal evacuations of London (136) before a definitive “moment of abandonment” (131), likely in the face of a major global military conflict that led to the final rise of a corporatocracy (evidenced by documents that treat the Land Rover Corporation as a kind of government body and evidence that health care had become little more than privatized euthanasia) that facilitated, we assume, the end of civilization itself.
Or at least civilization as Lambert (and we) knew/know it. Lambert’s journey north to the shores of present-day Loch Ness proves to him that he is not alone; he falls into the unfriendly clutches of the Macbeth clan—a tribe of around five thousand “survivors” genetically modified (ostensibly Africanized) to deal with the warmer climate but living in primitive, barbaric, and seemingly “Neolithic” (203) conditions. Lambert is taken hostage and treated as a supernatural signifier delivered to the clan from the mythical beyond beyond their own unwritten maps of consciousness. The village, replete with “wafting Chaucerian smells [of] ageing meat and offal; urine, straw, and dung” (215), is also itself littered with the detritus of the materialistic twentieth century—the clan decorates their hall with shiny compact discs, they revere a very familiar plastic golden arch as a war trophy won from the Macdonald clan, and the women wear bottle-caps as earrings—which is explained to its inhabitants through a roughly memorized (for literacy is nearly extinct) sermon by the dreadlocked clan leader Angus Kwame Macbeth. His own version of the future’s Book of Genesis consists primarily of a poorly memorized version of our own Chapter 24 of the Book of Isaiah:
Behold, the Lord maketh the earth empty, and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down, and scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof. The land shall be utterly emptied, and utterly spoiled; for the Lord hath spoken this word. The earth mourneth and fadeth away, the world languisheth and fadeth away, the haughty people of the earth do languish. The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof; because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore hath the curse devoured the earth, and they that dwell therein are desolate: therefore the inhabitants of the earth are burned, and few men left. In the city is left desolation, and the gate is smitten with destruction. For thou hast made of a city an heap; of a defenced city a ruin. (228)
When Macbeth discovers Lambert’s literacy, though, the time traveller quickly becomes a commodity for his ability to explain the clan’s heretofore muted documents and artifacts. Lambert’s near-fatal mistake comes when the increasingly affable Macbeth asks him to explain the concept of civilization itself during one of their conversations. Panicking because of his own recent revelations, though, Lambert indirectly “hint[s] at cycles of plunder and collapse” (259) aloud, wisely keeping his actual conclusions about human progress to himself (and us):
Civilization is plumbing
Civilization requires slaves
Civilization is gunpowder, printing, and the Protestant religion
Civilization is arranging the world so you needn’t experience it
Civilization is the gradual replacement of men by things
Civilization is living beyond your means
Civilization results in deserts
Civilization dies as easily from irony as from debauchery (259)
Lambert’s reflective honesty, however suppressed, is clearly coloured by the travelling that he has done across centuries and the evidence that he now has of civilization’s self-immolation upon the altar of unchecked materialism. Lambert is literally crucified as a cursed Saviour the next day, escaping only thanks to the secret scheming of his friend Mailie, who arranges for him to be pulled off the cross and secreted to a waiting sailboat which he steers silently across the Loch to safety in the beyond outside of the clan’s reach. Humbled and disheartened, Lambert gradually makes his way back to London to recover the Wells device and depart the year 2500 (and the narrative of A Scientific Romance) for the unknown shores of his next future world. Unlike Wells, Wright realizes that time travel can only move toward the future—one cannot return to alter the past—so Lambert’s disappearance into the oblivion of tomorrow comes to stand for the silence that A Scientific Romance threatens us with unless we begin to ask ourselves the here-and-now questions that, for Lambert, can only be rhetorical.
In his canonical updating, Wright agrees to speculate in a way that his predecessors did not: the natural world—tropically overgrown or otherwise—will not be the source of our civilizational collapse, but will instead bear its brunt with constancy. Humanity’s curse after NAFTA is not to survive against the malevolent natural world CanLit Survival-style, but to survive ourselves, with our own provocations of that world, and our material-driven exploitations of it in the name of progress and civilization. Even Wright’s Lambert, who at first seems to inhabit a lush and self-repairing Eden, acknowledges of his old world that “[o]ne thing seems clear enough: nature didn’t clobber us, except in self-defence. There was no deus ex machina, no cosmic foot…. Shall we go for the ‘great villain’ school of historical blame, or must we concede that the enemy of the people was the people? How many politicians were willing to tell the world that four billion, or six billion, or ten could never live the California dream?” (288–89). Still, the crux and thrust of this imaginative fiction lies not in its prognostications and admonishments, but in its probing speculations about and as a future.
Michael Murphy’s A Description of the Blazing World also speculates upon this world’s potential futures, albeit in a much different register than that of Wright’s A Scientific Romance. On the eve of the so-called Northeast Blackout of 2003 in which upwards of 60 million North Americans lost power due to a major overload, the Greater Toronto Area experienced cascading power failures that lasted anywhere between three and ninety-six hours. One of Murphy’s protagonists—fourteen-year-old Morgan Wells from “Nowhereville, NS” (18), in “shithole Toronto,” “the world’s dumbest city” (Murphy 64, 161) to spend the summer with his despised older brother—discovers a copy of Margaret Cavendish’s 1666 novella A Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World in his brother’s apartment while searching for candles in the dark. The young Morgan, reared on Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novels and in constant search of meaning in what angstily seems to him to be a meaningless world, believes the book itself and the circumstances by which it comes to him to be significant: “I wouldn’t go so far as to say I thought I was receiving a message from beyond the grave or anything, but it seemed strange to me that on the day when the power went out, when everyone in the whole city thought the world was about to end, I’d found a book that seemed to be about the world coming to an end. The world burning up” (Murphy 78). Although the blackout fails to deliver on its seeming apocalyptic promise, it sparks a morbid sense of foreboding about the state of post-NAFTA civilization that uses Cavendish’s original Blazing World as its ustopic template.
In fact, Cavendish’s enigmatic proto-feminist and proto-science-fiction tale is not in and of itself apocalyptic, despite all of its blazing. The narrative follows, to quote the young Morgan’s paraphrasing, “this woman, this super hot Lady with a capital L, who gets kidnapped by some foreigner for sex slave purposes” (51), but who stumbles into a literal other world at the North Pole after her captors die of exposure in the Arctic weather, because, thanks to a combination of Restoration-era geographical uncertainty and pure fictional imagination, “the Poles of the other World, joining to the Poles of this, do not allow any further passage to surround the World that way; but if any one arrives to either of these Poles, he is either forced to return, or to enter into another World” (Cavendish 155–56). The woman is quickly met by a variety of gentle, intelligent, and fantastical hybrid creatures (Bear-men, Bird-men, Fish-men, Worm-men) who whisk her away to the Emperor’s golden city (itself called Paradise) where she is immediately married to the Emperor and named Empress of all the Blazing World. As her first order of imperial business, she insists on understanding her new civilization—a world in which the sun, moon, and stars shine extraordinarily brightly, thus prompting the world’s pejorative descriptor (167). The Empress enlists her new subjects in an exhaustive survey of physical, metaphysical, scientific, biological, philosophical, and religious questions about the Blazing World in order to establish its characteristics. The Empress is able to establish some general facts about her own seemingly utopian society—that “the men were of several complexions, but none like any of our World … there was but one language in all that world, nor no more than one Emperor, to whom they all submitted with the greatest duty and obedience, which made them live in a continued peace and happiness, not acquainted with other forreign [sic] wars, or home-bred insurrections” (160), and that they enjoyed political and religious harmony and unanimity. In doing so the Empress establishes a speculative world that has its clear and recognizable precedent in the England of Cavendish’s own day. The Empress, though, grows wary of the arrogance of the scientific prognostications made by her servants with the help of both telescopes and microscopes, and she ultimately concludes, in order to “satirize the arrogant opinions of modern philosophers who claim that mankind has superior powers of observation, especially when aided by the technology of a microscope” (Bowerbank and Mendelson 31–32), that “Natures [sic] Works are so various and wonderful, that no particular Creature is able to trace her ways” (Cavendish 185). There are several reasons that this aspect of Cavendish’s text is historically, sociologically, and epistemologically remarkable, not the least of which is the vehemence with which she concludes her treatise (after a lengthy militaristic foray back into her own world). In her “Epilogue to the Reader,” Cavendish proffers an Atwoodian buffer against her inevitable detractors:
[I]n the formation of these Worlds, I take more delight and glory, then ever Alexander or Caesar did in conquering this terrestrial world…. I have made my Blazing-world, a Peaceable World, allowing it but one religion, one Language, and one Government; yet could I make another World … if any should like the World I have made, and be willing to be my Subjects, they may imagine themselves such, and they are such; I mean, in their Minds, Fancies or Imaginations; but if they cannot endure to be subjects, they may create Worlds of their own, and Govern themselves as they please … (251)
This is an invitation that Murphy willingly accepts in his reimagination of what The Blazing World (and the Blazing World) might promise in the new millennium, and one that his own text demands of us anew.
Appropriately, mid-blackout Toronto does become a kind of blazing world for its millions of inhabitants (Morgan included) with the newly observed brightness of the nighttime stars (Murphy 65, 66, 92, 169) and the suddenly “moon-shiny-night[s] … the first in decades” (67) in the city. This blazing aside, though, discovering the Cavendish book proves to be especially provocative for the teen’s overactive imagination; as a boy who frequently fantasizes about all of the ways he might die over the course of a typical day, Morgan is immediately able to draw connections between his plight and that of Cavendish’s Empress: “I was in a new world, a hostile environment, a humid garbage town full of strange creatures. [Cavendish’s] story reminded me of being downtown. Of seeing so many people from so many places looking so lost” (Murphy 52). Tellingly, and in direct defiance of his sister-in-law who has warned him about E. coli and tainted beef, young Morgan is “trying to decide between a regular burger and a cheeseburger in the Eaton Centre food court when the lights flickered, then went out” (42). Upon evacuating the mall, young Morgan makes his way to Union Station in the blinding heat in a suddenly frozen cityscape that invokes the chaos of 9/11 New York City:
The sidewalks were choking. Rivers of people. The subway was shut down, there were stranded commuters everywhere, briefcases and book-bags floating along the surface of the city. I’ve never seen that many bodies all in one space. All drowning. The traffic lights were out. The bodies, the cars, the metalized air. No one knew what was happening. (43)
Young Morgan’s “terror alert [goes] from yellow to orange” (48) as he makes his way to his brother’s home “thinking about weapons of mass destruction and the Middle East” (44). By the time he arrives, Morgan’s overactive imagination has concluded, irrefutably, that “[t]he blackout was clearly only the beginning. A test…. First take the power out, see what happens. Wait a day or two. Then cut the power off for good before sending in the nukes. It seemed so obvious. We’d be picking the flesh off our faces before the week was up. I knew it” (71). Among other things that Morgan suddenly “knows” upon uncovering the Cavendish book is that he must produce and preserve a record of the end-of-days, “[s]omething to leave behind for future archaeologists, something they could find three hundred and thirty-seven years after civilization as we know it had disappeared off the face of the earth” and after “the men in hazmat suits [had] comb[ed] through the smoking ruins of Toronto, a place still radioactive and crawling with subhuman winged creatures, airborne zombies, drooling, slobbering Torontonians desperate for a taste of human meat” (87). The young Morgan’s record, though unlike Cavendish’s, would be “[n]ot about a new world, but a world about to be no more. A dead world…. The nuclear power plants all Chernobyling at once, sending clouds of Black Death from one city to the next. The Great Lakes turning toxic in a half-second, bubbling and seething with biochemical diseases” (87).
Murphy’s A Description of the Blazing World endows its protagonist with the stifling burden of materialistic modernity wherein the Eaton Centre—“the mall that is one thousand malls, the A/C island at the heart of this hellhole city” (193)—becomes the his last refuge and escape: “the only place in Toronto that lets me forget I am in Toronto” (193). He has, it seems, given up. Unlike Wright’s tenacious protagonist, young Morgan is settling in for what is surely coming for him: the horrible fictional fact of tomorrow. Wright’s David Lambert has not, against all odds, given up. Looking back—to us, his readers—he still wonders if twentieth-century capitalism and civilization’s track record of greed and self-destruction could have been/might still be tempered:
Could it have gone another way? Is the Good Samaritan always a bad economist? Was capitalism—that “machine for demolishing limits”—a suicide machine? … [W]ere all human systems doomed to stagger along under the mounting weight of their internal logic until it crushed them? And I think of the Maya temples reaching higher and higher as the jungle died by the stone axe. And I think of Easter Island, and even there—where the limits must have been plain to anyone—the last tree came down to put up the last colossus, the rains washed the soil to the sea, the people starved and ate each other, and there was no escape because without wood there’s no canoe. (A Scientific Romance 167–68)
Both Wright and Murphy reinvigorate what they recognize in Wells and Cavendish as the nebulous and fleeting frailty of human existence on the planet, as well as our contradictory confidence in our own supremacy over both the space and time of our here-and-now. Wright’s mature speaker recognizes that the promise (and premise) of Wells’ original scientific romance is one of survival and evolutionary disaster resulting from the perfect functioning of epistemological, scientific, and economic systems of late modernity—A Scientific Romance revises this thesis into a postmodern ustopic world that does not allow us to get that far and that does not allow our here-and-now world to exist but in buried, mute fragments silenced by the planet itself. Lambert’s acknowledgement that “[e]ven if our peculiar gifts were ultimately fatal, nature will make the best of the mess we’ve left behind” (306) is mirrored awkwardly by young Morgan’s final adolescent apocalyptic vision of our civilizational insignificance: “When the great plague comes we’ll rot from the guts to the skin until there’s nothing left but corpses crumbling in the corners of rooms, floating bloated in the ocean, rotting slowly in the sand. We’re dead. We’re a fraction of a second. We were never here” (Murphy 234). That Morgan’s Blazing visions never come to fruition proves superficially disappointing to him as he heads back to Nova Scotia to start school again, but the terrifying promise that Cavendish’s ustopic text makes sparks in him an awareness of the fragility and artificiality of the air-conditioned world of late-capitalist Toronto, and makes visible the spectre of its own impending decimation. There is, apart from the fictional, no other world from which we might escape when this one begins to blaze.
In A Short History of Progress, Wright notes that “[o]ne of the dangers of writing a dystopian satire is how depressing it is when you get things right” (122). In the decade that he took to craft A Scientific Romance into the postmodern masterpiece that it was to become, Wright himself witnessed what we might consider the clearest marker of the urgency of the novel’s plea: when he began crafting the narrative he intended Lambert’s impending death from BSE to be a “wild extrapolation” (A Short History 122) of fictional licence—a fantastic exaggeration born of the then-muted speculations about the severity and scale of what was to become the global BSE crisis. By the time the novel was complete, though, several British citizens had died of the disease, and the narrative’s fictional thrust had become a terrifyingly real present. That is to say, then, the seeds and traces of the for-now-imaginary futures of both A Scientific Romance and A Description of the Blazing World exist today. They are the ustopias of the future; other worlds that are speculatively here-and-soon. And as the crumbling of our late-capitalist and post-NAFTA institutions continue to sow the hypothetical seed for the archaeologists of the future who might harvest our ruins centuries from now, Wright and Murphy leave their texts as warnings about repeating history, reconsidering “progress,” and rereading the promises of science fiction as a genre. Neither the time travel of Wells and Wright, nor the wild, blazing geographies of Cavendish and Murphy, are the point of their speculative or imaginative fictions—they are, we might assume, the fictions themselves. What they speculate upon—our world returned Edenic in our civilizational absence, the fiery culmination of our socio-economic suicide in an apocalyptic flash—remain the urgent and prescient threads seeded in SF’s master-narratives: reminders that, in the words of Carl Jung, “[t]hat which we do not bring to consciousness appears in our lives as fate” (qtd. in In Other Worlds 15). Novels like A Scientific Romance and A Description of the Blazing World deny the very concept of fate when it comes to their ustopias and their projections of our futures. They remind us, we hope, of the promise—not the sentence—of the future by trying to scare us straight with speculation. More importantly, both Wright and Murphy recognize the value that Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson attribute to Cavendish’s The Blazing World: they “urge us to consider whether new worlds and new natures are waiting to be discovered by those readers with bold imaginations” (34). So when Atwood wonders why we still insist on preserving, revisiting, and retelling the stories in the face of the great unknown tomorrow by asking, “Do we tell them to show off our skills, to unsettle the complacent audience, to flatter rulers, or, as Scheherazade the Queen of Storytelling did, to save our own lives?” (41), we might answer “yes” to all. But let us hope, then, that like David Lambert, we might let these novels, in their imaginative prophesying, do the same for us as we wade into our yet-to-be-written futures.
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