If it’s Tuesday, it must be time to bring up Margaret Atwood.

Okay, normally, I wouldn’t want to bring up Margaret Atwood twice in the same month, but this little Valve piece, “The Canadian SF ‘Canon’ and the Vexing Case of Margaret Atwood,” by Miriam Jones, says some kind of interesting things along the way.

Atwood’s plot relies too much on the actions of individuals. This was no doubt her intent: to create characters who are impelled to disrupt the mass consensus under which they live. However, in credible contemporary science fiction — as distinguished from space opera or adventure stories — the world is neither saved, nor destroyed, by isolated hero(ine)s or mad scientists. In this novel, not only do individual actions have irreversible global consequences, but individual actions in a social vacuum. It is more a solipsistic hallucination than a call to action, no matter how many books about the ecology Atwood recommends on the McClelland and Steward Website.

Ah, those hallmarks of the mainstream, the isolated hero(ine) and mad scientist. Where would we be without them?

(Fight amongst yourselves.)

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Update: Replaced link to Valve version with link to Ms. Jones’ blog version, on account of the Valve discussion on the article having apparently degenerated into an argument over who’s misquoted Stanislaw Lem and who’s insulted the memory of Philip K. Dick.