I am reading Lois McMaster Bujold's Shards of Honor as a favor for a friend, and I still have Ursula K. LeGuin's Lathe of Heaven on the go ( for those following along, that means War and Peace is neglected for the moment, though I made it as far as the wolf-hunting part, which is roughly half way).
Anyway, Bujold writes "Radial symmetry was popular among the tiny creatures occupying the ecological niches held by insects on Earth" (17) and "Do you think they could be like those birds from Earth, that pick parasites off cattle?" (21).
LeGuin writes about Dr. William Haber's office in Portland: "It did not have a view of Mount Hood [. . .] But on one of the walls was a big photographic mural of Mount Hood" (6). It is the absence of this mural that first signals the world-changing effect of Orr's dreams (24-5).
These two incidents of the unfamiliar fantastic and scientific compared to Earth (radials, Mount Hood) together made me think "Huh. Interesting. I bet a TCK wouldn't compare the current world with a past one. I bet they'd just occupy the new world, without comparison."
So, I set up a little experiment re: world-building to see if I was right.
SciFi (We are on spaceships, new planets and all that):
Bujold's Shards of Honor vs. CCK Nnedi Okorafor's Binti
Fantasy (We are on Earth, but its crazy different. )
LeGuin's Lathe of Heaven vs TCK Mohsin Hamid's Exit West
I need to do more work on this. I got blindsided by my second migraine of the week (after swimming which is so virtuous I ought to be radiating health, but I am not) so this is very preliminary.
Guys. The results of my experiment are surprising. I expected an absence of comparison in Hamid and Okorafor. I expected their characters to just get on with being in the new places. What I may have found instead is the introduction of that ever-mind boggling extra dimension: TIME.
Okorafor roots Binti in a fantasy of the past (ancestral land) as well as a science fiction of the future (launch port) when she has Binti muse "We Himba don't travel. We stay put. Our ancestral land is life; move away from it and you diminish. We even cover our bodies with it. Otjize is red land. Here in the launch port, most were Khoush. [. . . ] Here I was an outsider" (3).
Hamid describes portals through which migrants travel from one part of earth to another. Migrants cross immense geographic and cultural distance in an instant. However, the past get left behind, and all the people in it. "When we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind" writes Hamid (98), and adds "We are all migrants through time " (209).
It brings us back to Salman Rushdie's "Imaginary Homelands": "The past is a country from which we have all emigrated. It's loss is a part of our common humanity" (12).
It's true. We all do leave the past behind.
However, an early response to my hasty experiment is that SciFi and Fantasy contrasts "home" places (ancestral lands, Earth, which is home for Bujold's readers if not for protagonist Cordelia Naismith) with imagined ones, without much considering how the home places are necessarily also past places.
CCK and TCK SciFi and Fantasy cannot seem to help themselves in thinking about the importance of the past as it informs the future, and in so doing, reminds us of how irrevocably it is lost to us. Time as a metaphor for distance from place is of the essence.
