The Ambivalence of Memory in Naomi Mitchison’s Speculative Fiction

Abstract

Naomi Mitchison’s speculative fiction portrays learning as a process of unlearning. Travel Light (1952), Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962), and Solution Three (1975) animate radical relational possibilities, favoring protagonists who let go of their prior knowledge to let in the unknown. In each text, the otherworldly illuminates inner worlds, inciting change. Mitchison posits an epistemics of contact, a way of knowing that hinges on adaptation. Her characters make a craft of forgetting the narratives that condition their perception and intentionally recondition themselves, re-membering their histories.