Intro to SF class notes: It’s grey and sleepy today — beautiful weather, really, but more conducive to lying in bed and drafting lines of poetry than focusing on academic planning for a science fiction lit. class! I’m working in my home office, and have resorted to turning on the daylight lamp, the ring light, AND lighting candles, in an attempt to wake up a little bit. Hopefully the tea and Vyvanse will kick in soon.
The Intro to SF literature class is going reasonably well, I think. We’re finishing part 1 today (3.5 weeks), which is essentially precursors and Golden Age, and will be heading into part 2 tomorrow, which will cover 2nd wave feminism and cyberpunk, among other things. In 2.5 weeks! Yes, this pace is a little frenzied.
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I thought I’d take some time to recap a little of how it’s gone so far, for those curious. If you haven’t read these first stories and are feeling a bit dismayed because you thought you were an ardent fan, don’t feel too bad — they’re early, and weren’t as widely available as Asimov, etc. Worth seeking out, though, and all of these can be found in Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer’s _Big Book of Science Fiction_ (unless otherwise noted), if you want to catch up.
There will likely be some spoilers in the notes that follow, be warned. If you just want the titles, they’re here:
“The Star,” H.G. Wells (1897)
“Sultana’s Dream,” Rokheya Shekhawat Hossain (1905)
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Jorge Luis Borges (1940)
“The Comet,” W.E.B. Du Bois (1920)”
“Desertion,” Clifford D. Simak (1944)
“Beyond Lies the Wub,” Philip K. Dick (1952)
“Thunder and Roses,” Theodore Sturgeon (1946)
“The Star,” Arthur C. Clarke (1955)
“The Game of Rat and Dragon,” Cordwainer Smith (1955)
Optional: “The Widget, the Wadget, and Boff,” Ted Sturgeon (1955)
“The Last Question,” Isaac Asimov (1956)
“Sector General,” James White (1957)
“Pelt,” Carol Emshwiller (1958)
“ – All You Zombies – ,” Robert A. Heinlein (1958)
(mild spoilers follow)
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1. “The Star,” H.G. Wells (1897)– this was a good one to open class with — I read the first few pages out loud, and then had them finish reading silently (faster).
We discussed some of the classic conflict modes of fiction (person vs. person, person vs. nature (which morphs into person vs. technology), person vs. God / fate, person vs. self, person vs. society), which I think is a useful starting place for a science fiction course.
This story grapples with a big idea — what happens if an asteroid threatened to destroy all life on Earth? — and does a beautiful job of humanizing the effect, making it feel real. You could consider it a precursor to climate fiction, even though the catastrophe isn’t due to anything humans have caused. A sentence I like:
“But the yawning policeman saw the thing, the busy crowds in the markets stopped agape, workmen going to their work betimes, milkmen, the drivers of newscarts, dissipation going home jaded and pale, homeless wanderers, sentinels on their beats, and in the country, labourers trudging afield, poachers slinking home, all over the dusky quickening country it could be seen — and out at sea by seamen watching fo rthe day — a great white star, come suddenly into the westward sky!”
This is also a good one to address mortality, of course, and the concept of fate.
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2. “Sultana’s Dream,” Rokheya Shekhawat Hossain (1905)
My students adored this one — it’s very readable and easy to access, although they were sort of astonished that it was written in 1905, given the concepts involved, such as solar power. It’s primarily a feminist fantasy, and if you were teaching a women’s fiction course, you could definitely start with this. Hossain was a prominent Bengali writer and activist, famed for her social work on gender equality in what is now Bangladesh. “Although she was married at sixteen, Hossain’s husband was a progressive who allowed her to continue her education and who encouraged her activism.”
The students loved the sly humor of the piece. Part of what happens is that the men of this fantastic land are shut up in the zenana and the women walk freely.
“…it is not safe so long as there are men about the streets, nor is it so when a wild animal enters a marketplace.”
“Of course not.”
“Suppose some lunatics escape form the asylum and begin to do all sorts of mischief to men, horses, and other creatures; in that case, what will your countrymen do?”
“They will try to capture them and put them back into their asylum.”
“Thank you! And you do not think it wise to keep sane people inside an asylum and let loose the insane?”
“Of course not! said I, laughing lightly.
“As a matter of fact, in your country this very thing is done! Men, who do or at least are capable of doing no end of mischief, are let loose and the innocent women shut up in the zenana! How can you trust those untrained men out of doors?”
This would, of course, be a great precursor to discussing Raccoona Sheldon’s _The Screwfly Solution_, along with other gender essentialist science fiction of the 60s/70s.
As the VanderMeers note, this story is in “the form of a “conte philosophique,” which translates as “fable of reason.” The conte philosophique had existed for centuries in the West as a way for scientists or philosophers to present their findings, using the fictional frame of an imaginary journey to impart science or philosophical content.”
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3. Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Jorge Luis Borges (1940) — this one I’ll just note that I love, it’s totally mind-blowing, but my students (200-level class) were bewildered and mostly couldn’t get through it. Borges creates a group of people inventing a fantastic world, but as the story progresses, the world starts manifesting in our world. If I teach this class again at the 200-level, I’d make this optional reading. To give an example from early in the story:
“This thoroughgoing monism, or idealism, renders science null. To explain (or pass judgment on) an event is to link it to another; on Tlön, that joining-together is a posterior state of the subject, and can neither affect nor illuminate the prior state. Every mental state is irreducible: the simple act of giving it a name — i.e., of classifying it — introduces a distortion, a “slant” or “Bias.” One might well deduce, therefore, that on Tlön there are no science — or even any “systems of thought.” The paradoxical truth is that systems of thought do exist, almost countless numbers of them…”
Paragraphs and paragraphs like this — it’s kind of a lot for a 200-level class, I realize in retrospect. I wish I could read it in the original Spanish. This was translated by Andrew Hurley. A little more from later in the story:
“From the vast innards of a packing case emblazoned with international customs stamps she removed, one by one, the fine unmoving things: plate from Utrecht and Paris chased with hard heraldic fauna…a samovar. Among the pieces, trembling softly but perceptibly, like a sleeping bird, there throbbed, mysteriously, a compass. The princess did not recognize it. Its blue needle yearned toward magnetic north; its metal casing was concave; the letters on its dial belonged to one of the alphabets of Tlön. That was the first intrusion of the fantastic world of Tlön into the real world.”
Things get weirder from there. 
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This is getting long, so I think I’m going to take a break, come back in the next post. I’ll use the same photo, so it’s hopefully easy to find.