The week-by-week syllabus on Canvas is our controlling document: it should have everything you need

 

Thursday, 1-28 sharing

* The week-by-week syllabus on Canvas is our controlling document: it should have everything you need.

 

 

Today’s agenda

 

 

One course management note

A long twice-weekly Zoom (amidst other Zooms, I know): take a break if you need to.

 

 

Follow-up to Tuesday’s class

Darko Suvin’s successful SF authors include Karel Čapek, Stanisław Lem, and the Strugatsky brothers.

“In these authors we see the interplay between cognition and estrangement [more on this below] reaching its highest literary-aesthetic formulation, as well as the political valence of SF, and its historical affinity with a leftist, socialist politics, most fully and generatively produced.”

 

Discussion period at the start of class

•  Hubble, “How SF Shaped Socialism”

•  The podcast Bad Faith’s discussion of Star Trek and socialism

 

Who wants to contribute something from either of these texts?

Please note that a substantive contribution here will count toward your participation grade.

Be considerate of your colleagues: if you’ve already made a comment in class, please give others a chance to make one, too.

Survey results are in (59/63)! Let’s look at our starting SF “megatext”

 

 

What’s a megatext?

We all have a different experiential megatext. This course will likely change your SF megatext.

 

 

General point about the results

1.  Wonderfully wide range of responses.

2.  Slavic authors are represented on the list, but not a lot.

3.  Maybe SF is best understood as a radial category?

4.  Your survey input anticipates quite well the views of SF theorists and critics.

5.  What new twists on the genre(s) might Slavic SF offer us?

 

AUTHORS

 

Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451): 12 Suzanne Collins (Hunger Games): 10 Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker’s Guide): 5 Isaac Asimov (Foundation series): 5 Mary Shelley (Frankenstein): 5

Frank Herbert (Dune): 5 George Orwell (1984): 5

Margaret Atwood (Handmaid’s Tale): 4 Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game): 4 Veronica Roth (Divergent series): 4 Kurt Vonnegut (lots): 4

Ernest Cline (Ready Player One): 3

Philip K. Dick (The Man in the High Castle): 3 Stephen King (lots): 3

Jeff VanderMeer (Southern Reach trilogy): 3 Jules Verne (Twenty Thousand Leagues): 3 Andy Weir (The Martian): 3

Octavia Butler (Kindred): 2

Liu Cixin (Three-Body Problem): 2 Aldous Huxley (Brave New World): 2 Marie Lu (Legend series): 2

H. G. Wells (Time Machine): 2

 

Timur Bekmambetov (Night Watch, film) Charlie Booker (Black Mirror)

Pierce Brown (Red Rising):

Frederick Brown (short stories)

Cassandra Clare (Mortal Instruments series) Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey) Eoin Colfer (Artemis Fowl)

James Dashner (Maze Runner):

Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes series) Jasper Fforde (The Last Dragonslayer) Dmitry Glukhovsky (Metro series)

Robert Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land):

Hao Jingfang (Folding Beijing)

Ursula K. Le Guin (The Left Hand of Darkness) Anne Leckie (Ancillary Justice)

Stan Lee (Marvel)

Madeleine L’Engle (Wrinkle in Time) Lois Lowry (The Giver Quartet) Sarah J. Maas (Throne of Glass) Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

Christopher Paolini (To Sleep in a Sea of Stars) Victor Pelevin (Omon Ra)

Rick Riordan (Greek Mythology series) Brandon Sanderson (Mistborn series) Dan Simmons (Hyperion):

Strugatsky brothers (Roadside Picnic)

 

* Some other names that didn’t appear but might have: China Miéville, Neil Gaiman, H. P. Lovecraft, Iain M. Banks, William Gibson (cyberpunk)…

 

WORKS

 

Hitchhiker’s Guide (Adams): 5

The Martian (book by Weir and film by Scott): 5

1984 (Orwell): 4

Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury): 3

Dune (Herbert): 3

Hunger Games series (Collins): 3

Ender’s Game (Card): 2

Blade Runner (film, Scott): 2 Foundation series (Asimov): 2 Frankenstein (Shelley): 2 Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood): 2 I, Robot stories (Asimov): 2

The Three-Body Problem (Cixin): 2 Twenty Thousand Leagues (Verne): 2 A Memory Called Empire (Martine) Artemis Fowl (Colfer)

Brave New World (Huxley) Folding Beijing (Jingfang) Heroes of Olympus (Riordan) Homo Zapiens (Pelevin) Hyperion (Simmons) Kindred (Butler)

Legend series (Lu)

Metro 2033 (Glukhovsky)

Ready Player One (book and film)

Snow Crash (Stephenson)

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars (Paolini) Under the Dome (King) Watchmen (Moore)

The War of the Worlds (Wells)

 

“I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” (Ellison): 2 “All Summer in a Day” (Bradbury)

“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (Le Guin) “There Will Come Soft Rains” (Bradbury)

“Tears of the Gods” (Byrne)

Star Wars (original film and others, Lukas): 8

Interstellar (film, 2014): 6

Divergent (Roth): 4

Inception (film, 2010): 3

The Thing (film, 1982): 3

Alien film series: 2

Back to the Future series (film): 2

Blade Runner (film, Scott): 2

Ex Machina (film, 2014): 2

Gattaca (film, 1997): 2

2001: A Space Odyssey (film, Kubrick)

Arrival (film, Villeneuve)

Cube (film, 1998)

District 9 (film, 2009) Donnie Darko (film, 2001) Ghost in the Shell (anime) Invisible Man (film, 2020) La Jetée (short film, 1962) Lucy (film, 2014, Besson) Marvel films

Matrix series (films)

Metropolis (film, 1927)

Night Watch (film, Bekmambetov, 2004)

Snowpiercer (film, 2013)

The Maze Runner (film, 2014)

The Meg (film, 2018)

The Platform (Netflix, 2019)

The Avengers (films)

Planet of the Apes (classic film)

WALL-E (film, 2008)

 

Black Mirror (TV series): 5 Doctor Who (TV series): 2 The 100 (TV series)

 

SF vs Fantasy

 

Most agree that there is a distinction.

Some said that the line is blurry, and one of you said that SF is a subgenre of F. Some of you feel strongly that the distinction is crucial.

Does a prototype framing help resolve any tensions here?

 

Arthur C. Clarke said: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Even though things in SF can seem magical, the author should try to explain them.

One fancy way of saying this is that there is a strong “cognition effect.”

 

 

SF                                                        Fantasy

scientifically speculative                     make-believe

scientific                                              romantic

scientific proof                                    pure imagination

possible                                               impossible

could come true                                  could never come true (purposefully unrealistic) abides by rules of our world               makes its own rules (anything can happen)

robots and spaceships as tropes          dragons and castles, monsters and witches as tropes future or other-worldly                       more medieval or in the past

deep philosophical meaning                less of a deep meaning, more escapist critique of our reality                          escapism from our reality

 

 

Some other points

1.  The genre category does impact our expectations before reading/viewing.

2.  SF reflects on our current society to a much greater extent.

 

 

SF definition: criteria

SF is fiction that has elements of or is focused on science/technology. It must be plausible or potentially realistic.

It relies on imaginings of future possibilities.

It has common and recurring tropes: time-travel, robots, aliens, spaceships, lasers… It is often focused on sociocultural change as the result of scientific innovation.

It explores the psychology/experience of our world through other-worldly representations. It answers what-ifs: it has a kind of pragmatic thrust.

It suggests parallels to our own world: scientific, social, political.

It warns us about something by providing commentary on our world.

 

Some good phrasings

•  SF amplifies our reality. It bends and distorts the realities of our life.

•  SF explores what will happen if we don’t heed the warning.

•  SF investigates the question of whether science and technology make us gods or slaves.

•  SF addresses the tension between who we are now and who we might become.

 

Why is SF so popular?

Because we already live in an SF world. We also like to dream (about the future).

SF speaks directly to us in the here and now. It is fun!

 

Other concrete points

•  What better way to examine the human condition than by throwing humanity into a completely different world?

•  It invites us to think outside the box and removes limitations on our imagination.

•  It’s relatable: we see the future through characters that we identify with.

•  It inspires us to want a better world.

•  SF is a reflection of today’s world in a distorted mirror.

•  It flatters us a bit in portraying us as clever and innovative enough not just to survive our current challenges (gulp), but to advance and progress. And who doesn’t want to hope that we’re capable of that—that we’re even capable of greatness (eg, colonizing first the solar system, then the galaxy) as a species?

•  SF is just plain cool.

 

 

 

This, then, is our collective (and individual) baseline for an understanding of SF at the start of this course. How might that understanding change for you as the semester unfolds?

 

Framing SF through the work of theorists and critics

Let’s first look at some definitions by SF theorists and critics

•  SF is “charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision” (Hugo Gernsback)

•  SF is “realistic speculation about future events” (Robert Heinlein)

•  “That’s all SF was ever about: hating the way things are, wanting to make them different” (Ray Bradbury)

•  “SF is that branch of literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance on human beings” (Isaac Asimov)

 

 

•  SF is a “way to rebel [because] the world we actually have does not meet my standards” (Philip

K. Dick)

 

•  SF is “what we point to when we say it” (Damon Knight)… it’s a megatext!

 

 

 

Darko Suvin’s definition: cognitive estrangement (+ catharsis) and the novum

 

 

The “Suvin event” in the critical lit on SF

Suvin’s 1970s work on SF as a genre put SF on the literary-critical map. His definition of SF is still the standard today.

 

 

Suvin’s definition in a nutshell

SF is “a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.”

 

SF is a literature of “cognitive estrangement”: let’s break Suvin’s definition down!

 

What is cognitive?

SF works often give us a peculiar “cognitive shudder.”

 

 

Cognition implies reasoning about something, but not (at least for Suvin) about the scientific elements in an SF work.

The central role played by cognition “is not to facilitate squabbling over the rightness or wrongness about this or that limited scientific claim, but rather to facilitate our return from the science fictional estrangement back to the context of the world in which we all actually live and work and struggle.”

 

 

Wow do we experience the “shudder”? What is the work’s message?

What does it prompt us to think about?

How is it tethered to our here and now—and how does it critique that here and now? How does engaging with this work change our perspective?

 

 

 

“Cognitive” is broader than hard science.

Some critics have argued that “science” in SF is the least interesting part: the crudest measure of interpreting SF is to ask whether the author got the science right.

 

Part of this includes sociocultural/sociopolitical commentary.

Suvin argues that what makes SF an important literary genre “isn’t its ray guns or its hyperdrives or its novel patent laws but its visions of a radically different social order that in the end is always a critique of our own very flawed one.”

This can lead to a kind of intellectual/spiritual/emotional catharsis.

 

 

 

 

 

Note that not all works of SF have a strong cognitive element. Many works of SF fail to live up to the potential of the genre.

Whether a given work of SF has a strong cognitive component does not have one right answer.

 

What, according to Suvin, is estrangement?

-  It refers to “that element in SF that we recognize as different, that ‘estranges’ us from the familiar and everyday.”

-  In SF, estrangement is “the formal framework” of the genre itself—it is its underlying attitude and dominant formal device.

-  “A representation which estranges is one which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar.”

-  Estrangement can be merely escapist but it can also be cognitively creative, and this is what results in the best SF.

 

 

 

 

If SF were only about cognition, then it would be a scientific or documentary genre, not fiction.

 

 

Estrangement gives SF its fictional twist.

Estrangement must be co-present with cognition because it is “this co-presence that allows SF both relevance to our world and the position to challenge the ordinary, the taken-for-granted.”

 

 

What is the “novum”?

Suvin’s novum is the “point of difference” in a SF story.

“An SF text may be based on one novum, such as the device that enables H. G. Wells’s hero to travel through time in The Time Machine (1895). More usually it will be predicated on a number of interrelated nova, such as the varieties of futuristic technology found aboard the starship Enterprise in Star Trek, from faster-than-light travel to matter-transportation machines.”

-  This SF novum, Suvin insists, must not be supernatural.

 

Discussion period to end class

 

 

Texts

The podcast Chapo Trap House’s interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. The Activist Files Podcast’s episode on SF as social-justice strategy.

 

 

 

 

For your homework, see the week-by-week syllabus on Canvas.

But note that our start-of-class discussion period next Tuesday will be devoted to texts that attempt to define SF, including some of Suvin’s own work that we’ve summarized today.