For
the first issue of MOSF Journal of
Science Fiction, our editorial team
reached out to science fiction scholars around the world and invited them to
tell us how science fiction has changed how they perceive the world. Here’s
what some of them said.
“Science fiction is the genre in
which I feel most at home, despite its association with the alien, futuristic,
and off-world. Perhaps it’s because science fiction was an integral part of my
childhood, as present as religion was absent. My parents were self-described
secular humanists who never spoke about God, although they frequently made
reference to “grokking,” a term that, even at an early age, I understood to
mean a kind of spiritual communion (I learned of its Heinleinian derivation only after raiding my parent’s bookshelf as a teenager). We
lived in a small New York City apartment whose cramped quarters were expanded
by big ideas, some of them about space and time, topics that fascinated my
father. Copies of Astronomy Magazine
and Sky & Telescope
were strewn around our living room. During the summer, a large telescope was
permanently positioned out our bathroom window. Star Trek
was one of our few family rituals.
The
first film I remember being taken to see was 2001:
A Space Odyssey
at Hayden Planetarium. I was six years old, far too young to understand the
narrative, but I still experienced the film as a kind of visual symphony. On my
second viewing in college, I wept inconsolably during the final scenes with the
Star Child and, when friends asked why, I was only able to express a feeling of
primal longing. The longing was, in retrospect, for home, although not the one
I had left behind despite my early encounter with the film. Rather, it was for
the home I had yet to discover. The teleology and sense of inevitably that the
film conveys in such poetic and monolithic terms filled me with a desire for
meaning and purpose, both of which eluded me at that age. The power of science
fiction has, for me, always been in part about the curiosity and even longing
that it inspires in relation to the uncharted. By rendering the familiar
strange and the strange familiar, science fiction fosters a psychological,
spiritual, and intellectual reorientation that makes it not only a form of
entertainment, but also a mode of critical inquiry.
A
good deal of my current work as a digital media maker and scholar is focused on
questions around media, technology, and the body—that is, the ways in which
consciousness, perception, identity, and desire are mediated by, projected
onto, and expressed through visual and communications technologies. I have
found not only science fiction, but also what Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. calls science-fictionality, “a mode of response that frames
and tests experiences as if they were aspects of a work of science fiction,”[1] indispensable for both thinking
through and helping my students to engage with these questions. Science fiction
films, from Metropolis to The
Matrix,
have provided some of the most enduring critiques of the socio- and
psycho-physiological effects of visual media technologies, from the cinema to
the internet. It is the unique propensities of science fiction for
self-reflexivity, in addition to its ability to reorient, that inspire me to
return to it again and again.”
—Allison de Fren, Ph.D.
2010
winner of the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pioneer Award
“As a long-time science
fiction reader, I no longer have much interest in novels of psychological
realism. Realist novels tend to treat the world as a background to the
foreground of individual character development and conflict. The world of such
novels is a given and, therefore, requires very little attention except insofar
as it impacts the characters who are central to its particular plots. In
science fiction, the world itself is foregrounded and its characters are
embedded in that world—whether that world is a future Earth, some other planet,
or the whole of the universe. Psychological realism magnifies the specifics of
the individual psyche, while science fiction is the genre of the zoom-out.
My favourite example of
this comes at the end of H.G. Wells’s short story, “The Star” (1897), which
tells of the catastrophic impact on the Earth of a passing planetary body. In
the final paragraph of his story, Wells shifts the perspective from human
beings to that of astronomers on Mars. Viewed through their telescopes, the
Earth seems barely touched, “which,” as the narrator points out, “only shows
how small the vastest of human catastrophes may seem, at a distance of a few
million miles” (Wells, 1897).
Reading science fiction
can also affect how one thinks about the relationships among past, present, and
future. As has often been noted, science fiction can historicize the present,
inviting us to view it as the past of some future time and, therefore, as
having some direct responsibility for creating that future. Once again, Wells
has given us a perfect example in The Time Machine (1895), in
which the Time Traveller contemplates his own Victorian moment from the
perspective of the radically transformed far-future world of 802,701. The
implication in Wells’s novella, of course, is that the Victorian present is
more or less directly responsible for the devolution of humanity into the
grotesque remnants that are the Eloi and the Morlocks. Also implicit in this is
the idea that the future is not a single fixed and determined point toward
which we are inevitably drawn, but something contingent and undetermined,
capable of being shaped in many different directions. Everything in the world,
both past and future, shares in this contingency, and this leaves us free to
dream of worlds and futures that could be otherwise. Ultimately, science
fiction has politicized my view of the world.”
—Veronica
Hollinger, Ph.D.
Co-editor
of Science Fiction Studies
[1] Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction
(Wesleyan University Press, 2008).