I was recently asked to speak at the Library of Congress at an SF lecture series hosted by Colleen Cahill and Nate Evans on the subject of my teaching in SF.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s nothing fancy, a lunchtime lecture, but I enjoyed reflecting on the classes I’ve had, the\u00c2\u00a0 hundreds of minds I’ve poisoned with evil genre literature.\u00c2\u00a0 A few friends have asked me what I said, so here it is:<\/p>\n
What I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve Learned Teaching Science Fiction<\/strong> I finished teaching the most recent versions of these classes I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be talking about just a week ago. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s been humbling after a summer of assigning homework to my students, to then be faced with homework of my own. First let me say that I had prepared a breathtaking Power Point presentation with slow dissolves that would\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve made your teeth ache with envy, but my dog ate my jump drive, and all I have are these few crummy paper pages.<\/p>\n As those who know my fiction may have noticed, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m excessively fond of epigraphs, so I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve appended one to this talk with my apologies to T. S. Eliot and J. Alfred Prufrock, Hamlet too, I suppose. For those of you who might not know, John Clute is the author of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction<\/em> and knows everything:<\/p>\n I am not John Clute, nor was meant to be; I suppose I should apologize to John too, but he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a friend, with a good sense of humor.<\/p>\n It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s been my good fortune for the last seven years to teach a science fiction literature course every summer at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. For five years, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve\u00c2\u00a0 taught an Urban Fantasy class every summer as well. Most of my students are seniors, from a wide range of majors. While there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s always a fan or two in every class, the vast majority are, to use the snobbish fan term, Mundanes<\/em>, those who never browse the Science Fiction & Fantasy ghetto at Barnes & Noble or attend conventions where people don costumes or filk. Many of them aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t big fiction readers of any sort. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re looking to graduate, to become doctors, artists, engineers; they need credits. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Science Fiction? Urban Fantasy? Why not?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d they say. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve learned plenty of useless shit already.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d In a fluke this last summer, no one in the science fiction class knew that was what they were signing up for. The class schedule just said \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Readings in Literature.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d One of the best classes I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve had in a recent years, as it turned out.<\/p>\n A side note on the term Urban Fantasy: I use it to denote fantasy with a contemporary setting. I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t list it as Contemporary Fantasy, because in English Department parlance Contemporary usually denotes time of composition (Contemporary Novel, Contemporary American Literature, etc.) not the setting of the tale, so that Tolkien, for example, would be included in Contemporary Fantasy, but I definitely didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to include him and his nostalgic brethren in my class. Since I made this choice, Ellen Datlow and John Clute have both told me I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m wrong to use Urban Fantasy in such a broad way. Meanwhile, to further complicate matters, the term has become a werewolf\/vampire marketing juggernaut of fearsome proportions. But once a course title makes it into the schedule of classes, it has a certain institutional inertia to remain as it is. My apologies to Ellen and John for persisting in my folly.<\/p>\n These are compressed summer classes, 15 weeks scrunched into 5. We meet 4 days\/week, two-and-a-quarter hours\/day. The long sessions allow me to show movies, the movies give the students time to read the books. In each class, we discuss 5 films and 5 books in 5 weeks. The science fiction class is a brisk historical survey typically beginning in the fifties with Invasion of the Body Snatchers <\/em>and Alfred Bester\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s The Stars My Destination<\/em>, proceding decade by decade with such pairs, ending with a very recent science fiction film I believe deserves more attention (this year it was Alex Rivera\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Sleep Dealer<\/em>), and whatever science fiction novel made the biggest splash in the previous year (this year it was Boneshaker). The Urban Fantasy is similarly built around pairs of movies and books, beginning with the mythic Pan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Labyrinth <\/em>and Neil Gaiman\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s The Anansi Boys<\/em> and wandering increasingly weird paths until we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re in Kelly Link and Being John Malkovich<\/em> country.<\/p>\n Really long books are out. No Hyperion<\/em>. No Dune<\/em>. 500 pages is about the absolute limit, but if they like it well enough, the length is not usually the issue you might think. And if they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t like it, 200 pages is too friggin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 long.<\/p>\n There is a science-fictional quality to the whole enterprise for me. The university always puts me in the same windowless classrooms, and it occurred to me while teaching The Forever War recently, that I could easily be on a starship where I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m older each year, and my crew is always the same age.<\/p>\n To teach a novel or a film, I have to read or view it multiple times, taking the thing apart and putting it back together again to see how it works. I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think of a better way for a writer to spend his time. So before I even step into the classroom, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a return for me. Reassuringly I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve found that good craftsmanship usually pays off in reader response. And respond they do. And that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s when the real fun begins.<\/p>\n Probably the most delightful thing I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve learned teaching these classes is that this literature, shelved and marketed and adored in its own ghetto, but spurned by the general public and especially English Departments [insert boos and hisses here] is indeed for everyone. Well, a diverse group of middle class college students anyway. And I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not talking about the science fiction usually embraced by English Departments like Orwell, Huxley, Atwood, and Vonnegut. In fact, if a writer has ever objected to being identified as a science fiction writer\u00e2\u20ac\u201das both Atwood and Vonnegut have\u00e2\u20ac\u201dI make it a point to honor their squeamish desires to leave their literary reputations unsullied by keeping their sorry asses off my syllabi. I am considering bending this rule for Vonnegut\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 1959 Sirens of Titan<\/em> to replace the now lamentably out-of-print Stars My Destination<\/em>. I think back in those days, Vonnegut didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t mind what you called his stuff, as long as you published it.<\/p>\n Over the years, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve taught Alfred Bester, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Joe Haldeman, Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson, Haruki Murakami, Neal Stephenson, Maureen McHugh, Robert Charles Wilson, Connie Willis, Jonathan Lethem, Cormac McCarthy, Cory Doctorow, Nalo Hopkinson, and Cherie Priest in the science fiction class; Tim Powers, Jonathan Carroll, Neil Gaiman, Jeffrey Ford, Kelly Link, China Mi\u00c3\u00a9ville, Sean Stewart, Thorne Smith, Peter Straub, and Haruki Murakami in the Urban Fantasy class. Films shown include Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Dr. Strangelove, Them, Alien, Starman, Galaxy Quest, Brother From Another Planet, Blade Runner, Invasion of the Body Snatchers <\/em>(1956 & 1978), Star Wars, The Children of Men, Sleep Dealer, Terminators 1 & 2, 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/em>, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show<\/em> in science fiction; Edward Scissorhands, The Rapture, The Sixth Sense, Being John Malkovich, Donnie Darko, Pan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Labyrinth, Harvey, Let the Right One In<\/em>, and Stranger than Fiction<\/em> in Urban Fantasy.<\/p>\n In each class, students also review a film of their own choosing, which is often where I get ideas for new films on the syllabus. In recent years, these have increasingly been small films available on Netflix streaming and other internet byways and foreign films. They don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have a problem with small budget art if it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s interesting and smart.<\/p>\n Their judgments usually don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t conform to the stereotypes of their generation, who supposedly have the attention spans of gnats and won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t like anything that doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t feature several explosions every few minutes. This summer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s science fiction class, for example, screened both 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/em>, which only a few had seen before, and Terminator 2: Judgment Day<\/em>, which they had all seen multiple times. They adored 2001<\/em>. Everything about it\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthe models, the music, the minimal dialogue, the ideas. They even liked the light show. On the other hand, they dismissed T2<\/em> for having too much pointless action, especially chase sequences that went on way too long to no real purpose. In other words, they didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t like it for the reasons Hollywood says they should.<\/p>\n Teaching the fifties is something of a challenge. Supposedly they are blind to black and white films, but the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers<\/em> wins them over every time. They need some help with cultural references from an alien world, like what the significance is of the two leads having recently been to Reno, Nevada. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re amazed to hear about the quaint divorce laws of the time.<\/p>\n For the 50s novel, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve used at different times, Alfred Bester\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s The Stars My Destination<\/em>, Robert Heinlein\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Starship Troopers<\/em>, and Ray Bradbury\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Fahrenheit 451<\/em>. They always get into Bester\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s marvelous antihero Gully Foyle and the planet-hopping future we thought we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d have. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re pleasantly surprised with Heinlein\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Starship Troopers<\/em>. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I was afraid it was going to be nonstop battles,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d one student said, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153but there was hardly any of that. Instead it was this really interesting story of this soldier\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s life.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Imagine.<\/p>\n Bradbury\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Fahrenheit 451<\/em>, however, was a serious flop. I included it that year because I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d been asked to lecture on it at a local library as part of a Big Read program. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the official national Good Science Fiction Novel. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re supposed to like it. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s clearly good for them, with a Strong Message. Lots of messages actually once you start looking. Some of them might bear a little critical scrutiny. The didacticism begins to grate, the characters to implode under the weight of such baggage. The class could live with that, sort of, but then one of the brilliant young women who frequently show up in my classes asked, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Is it me, or is this guy totally sexist?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (Never a complaint leveled at Bester, by the way). I let them hash it out for a while, and they made a pretty strong case that it wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t just her but him. I did share with them the plot of the 2001 Bradbury short story entitled \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Fore\u00e2\u20ac\u009d which appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction<\/em>, even though the story\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s neither fantasy nor science fiction. Here it is\u00e2\u20ac\u201dMan finds distraught buddy at his driving range banging balls, and asks what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s wrong. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153My wife cheated on me,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d friend says. Man leaves him at driving range, drives to friend\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s house, rings bell. Door opens; he slugs friend\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s wife in the kisser. End of story. Ha. Ha. I was in a plane when I read it, or I would\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve thrown it across the room. We had an interesting discussion about why a nice guy like F & SF <\/em>Editor Gordon Van Gelder would publish such a story. Perhaps to get Ray\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s name on the cover? It had a certain ironic resonance with the themes of Fahrenheit 451<\/em>.<\/p>\n Philip K. Dick\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?<\/em>\u00e2\u20ac\u201dmy usual sixties choice\u00e2\u20ac\u201dis one of the most consistently successful books in the science fiction class. One unexpected side effect is that it inevitably damages the reception of Blade Runner <\/em>if I show it later. The art majors particularly like the Blade Runner look, but the movie leaves out the most interesting parts of the novel\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthe animals, the religion, the mood boxes, the nuanced complexity of the androids. And trying to turn it into a love story is fraught with peril they perceive right away. The \u00e2\u20ac\u0153love scene\u00e2\u20ac\u009d between Rachael and Rick in the film one student described as feeling like date rape\u00e2\u20ac\u201dshe is supposed to be a slave, after all. They also responded strongly to Dick\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s The Man in the High Castle<\/em>, with many choosing it as their favorite book in the course. But for some, alternate history that weird pushes their SF boundaries a little too far\u00e2\u20ac\u201dnot necessarily a bad thing\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll definitely teach the book again. The very notion of alternate history led to an interesting discussion about the nature and purpose of fiction, that any sort of world is a fictional possibility.<\/p>\n From the 70s, Le Guin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Lathe of Heaven<\/em> and Dispossessed<\/em> have both been successful, though the shorter Lathe was more popular. The didacticism of both bothered some. In general, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve noticed that mainstream critics will embrace didactic SF, when they would find such overt preachiness bothersome in mainstream fiction. Is this to make amends for its alleged escapism?<\/p>\n Joe Haldeman\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 1974 The Forever War<\/em> has been one of the most successful novels in recent years. They have no trouble understanding the time dilation science at the heart of the plot, and they like its relentlessly unromantic view of war. The sweet ending gets the cheesy accusation occasionally\u00e2\u20ac\u201done of the sharper barbs in their critical arsenal\u00e2\u20ac\u201dbut they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re willing to concede our hero has definitely earned it.<\/p>\n The film Alien<\/em> always does well with its dark, gritty future, but once the alarms start going off, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not much to talk about except the cat and Sigourney\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s tush. A chase in space is still just a chase. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve tried both the 900 lb. science fiction gorillas of the decade, and their failures were cataclysmic and interesting. I think the students were embarrassed by their youthful experience of both. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m speaking, of course, of Star Wars <\/em>and The Rocky Horror Picture Sh<\/em>ow. Star Wars <\/em>left them gagging on its cheesiness. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I remembered it as being so much better,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d was the consensus, edited for a general audience. I tried to salvage it by explaining what a game changer it was at the time, but they weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t having any of it. The Force business especially made them cringe. My other misguided experiment was screening The Rocky Horror Picture Show<\/em>. The consensus in this case could be summed up as, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I was way too loaded to remember\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthis was what I was watching?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d They didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to talk about it.<\/p>\n The next stop on the syllabus should be a no-brainer, right? The eighties-early nineties. Cyberpunk. Gibson. Neuromancer<\/em>. I loved those books. I was first told about them by enthusiastic undergrads who were devouring them. Something called the internet happened between now and then, however. For my students now, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s too much dissonance between Gibson\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s cyberspace and the one they grew up in to track what the hell he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s up to. They don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t care if he did coin the term, he just gets so many details wrong. The anachronistic carbon paper and Soviet agents in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?<\/em> don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t bother them. They can bracket out such details, but Gibson\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s cyberspace cowboys just can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t ring true. Friend Brett Cox who teaches an SF class in Vermont reports the same result.<\/p>\n Neal Stephenson\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Snow Crash is experiencing a similar premature aging of the once hip. Though my students liked Y.T, a strong female character, they weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t impressed with Stephenson\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Metaverse either. Tellingly, one bright fellow said he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d been talking to some older guys, meaning in their thirties, who had totally been into Snow Crash<\/em> when they were young. Ouch. All other Stephensons are too damn long, though I love The Diamond Age<\/em>. As for film, the 80s are a problem child again. The various alien-as-messiah flicks like Starman, E.T<\/em>., and Brother From Another Planet <\/em>are too cheesy, and The Terminator<\/em> is stale. I usually come back to Blade Runner<\/em>.<\/p>\n As for recent science fiction, they typically respond as fans would. They adored Briar, Cherie Priest\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Mom-on-a-Mission in Boneshaker<\/em>. They liked Cory Doctorow\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Little Brother<\/em> the year before. Interestingly, Oprah notwithstanding, they were least taken in recent years with Cormac McCarthy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s The Road<\/em>. Too damn dark. Everyone loves the father-son story and the gorgeous writing, but the world doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t hang together, and the ending makes zero sense with the rest of the novel. Science fiction film has been rich in quality choices in recent years\u00e2\u20ac\u201dChildren of Men<\/em> and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind<\/em> were especially effective.<\/p>\n They are wide open to books and films from other cultures. Not turned off by subtitles, they really liked the Mexican film Sleep Dealer<\/em>, with its third world perspective. The Spanish Pan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Labyrinth<\/em> and the Swedish Let the Right One In<\/em> were among the most popular films I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve shown in Urban Fantasy. A project I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve set myself is to explore Latin American science fiction for inclusion in future courses.<\/p>\n In the Urban Fantasy class, Thorne Smith\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 1926 Topper<\/em> was a surprising success, an experiment in teaching one of Neil Gaiman\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s influences. They responded to the wry humor and the sexy ghosts. The critique of empty conformity proved surprisingly up-to-date. China Mi\u00c3\u00a9ville\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s brilliantly executed The City & The City<\/em> was the favorite book this summer. The Swedish vampire movie Let the Right One In<\/em> was the favorite film. Both of these use conventional genre elements to construct unconventional commentaries on their subjects. One is a noir tale of a divided city whose halves actually occupy the same space and whose citizens \u00e2\u20ac\u0153unsee\u00e2\u20ac\u009d each other; the other, the tale of a vampire who, as she puts it, has been \u00e2\u20ac\u0153twelve for a very long time.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d One of the more successful books in the class has been the heady, enigmatic Kafka on the Shore<\/em> by Haruki Murakami. They like its metaphoric, elusive nature and its strong cast of characters. I try to include a short story collection in this class, usually Jeffrey Ford or Kelly Link because I think they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re doing some wonderful things with the short form. There are usually a few enthusiastic students, but in general the short story is a tougher sell, as it is with the larger reading public. If you figure out why, let me know. In both courses I would like to include a sampling of some of the quality short fiction available online in abundance.<\/p>\n Science Fiction likes to call itself a literature of ideas, and my students definitely respond to the ideas. What is it to be human? Who are we, and what will we become? How will the world change? How could it have been otherwise? But in fiction, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the characters, Stupid, and writers who know that, from Bester and Heinlein to Mi\u00c3\u00a9ville and Murakami tend to have their ideas discussed with the greatest passion.<\/p>\n In short, what I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve learned teaching science fiction, full of dark futures and human folly, is that the future is in the hands of a bunch of smart, sensitive, open-minded, curious, talented, caring young people. At the risk of sounding cheesy, it gives me hope.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was recently asked to speak at the Library of Congress at an SF lecture series hosted by Colleen Cahill and Nate Evans on the subject of my teaching in SF.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s nothing fancy, a lunchtime lecture, but I enjoyed … Continue reading
\nA Talk Presented at the Library of Congress, August 5, 2010<\/p>\n
\nAm an adjunct faculty, one that will do
\nTo swell enrollment, fill a section or two.<\/p>\n
\nThe hands down successful novel for cyberpunk has actually been Haruki Murakami\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 1984 Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World<\/em>. Instead of Japan-saturated America, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re in America-soaked Japan, plus that unique surreal space Murakami is so good at.<\/p>\n