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.
