Quiz
Questions for today
- What have we said fantasy and science fiction are?
- What unites them as speculative fiction?
- What is distinctive about the stories we read for today?
- How are utopia, dystopia, and apocalypse related?
- Does it matter whether a story’s science is sound?
What have we said fantasy is?
Think back to “Hans-My-Hedgehog,” “The Story of the Hard Nut,” “Rip Van Winkle,” “Transformation,” “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton,” “Goblin Market,” “Feathertop,” and “The Magic Mirror.”
Fantasy in our stories
| feature | where we saw it |
|---|---|
| Competing worlds | Cosmo’s room and the room in the mirror; the goblin men’s glen |
| Rules without explanations | the horoscope in “The Hard Nut”; Rip’s twenty-year sleep |
| Transformation | Hans, half hedgehog; a scarecrow made a gentleman |
| Portal or immersion | the mirror as a door; Mother Rigby’s witchcraft taken for granted1 |
| Re-enchantment | escape from a disenchanted, mechanical age2 |
What have we said science fiction is?
Think back to the first day of class and to Paper Girls.
Estrangement and cognition
Science fiction is “a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition.”3
- Estrangement: the story’s world is different from the author’s own.
- Cognition: the difference has causes, rules, and consequences, and the story works them out.
- The novum, the “new thing,” is what makes the difference.
- Suvin argues that fantasy estranges without cognition.
- But we may not agree: Mother Rigby’s animation of Feathertop satirized gentlemen. Breaking the magic mirror undercut fairy tale endings.
What makes both fantasy and science fiction part of speculative fiction?
“A super category”
Speculative fiction is “a super category for all genres that deliberately depart from imitating ‘consensus reality’ of everyday experience.”4
Delany’s levels of subjunctivity5
| a story about events that… | is |
|---|---|
| happened | reportage |
| could have happened | realist fiction |
| could not have happened | fantasy |
| have not happened | science fiction |
H. G. Wells (1866-1946)
- English author hugely influential on science fiction
- The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898)
- Hugo Gernsback, launching Amazing Stories in 1926, defined “scientifiction” as “the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story”
“The Star”
- “The archetypal Wells story concerns the eruption of the extraordinary into the ordinary.”6
- Wells references scientific instruments: “photographic apparatus and spectroscope,” the “clicking telegraph.”
- Story considers both scientific effects of the star (e.g., climate change), as well as scientific responses (e.g., the work of the mathematician)
What effect does “The Star’s” final paragraph have on the story?
The Martian astronomers—for there are astronomers on Mars, although they are very different beings from men—were naturally profoundly interested by these things. They saw them from their own standpoint of course. “Considering the mass and temperature of the missile that was flung through our solar system into the sun,” one wrote, “it is astonishing what a little damage the earth, which it missed so narrowly, has sustained. All the familiar continental markings and the masses of the seas remain intact, and indeed the only difference seems to be a shrinkage of the white discoloration (supposed to be frozen water) round either pole.” Which only shows how small the vastest of human catastrophes may seem, at a distance of a few million miles.
On “apocalypse”
- In ordinary speech, apocalypse means the end of the world
- Etymologically, apocalypse means “revelation” or “unveiling”
- In apocalyptic literature, supernatural beings reveal cosmic mysteries to humans
- The Book of Revelation is apocalyptic in the sense that it reveals the Christian vision of the end of the world
- The sense of apocalypse as the end of the world alludes to the Book of Revelation
“The Star” and apocalypse
- “The Star” tells the story of an expected end of the world that becomes a catastrophe instead: millions die, but humanity survives
- In “The Comet,” Jim and Julia believe the world has ended, but only New York City has
- Both stories ask what changes as a result of expected or perceived apocalypse. How does the pre-apocalyptic world persist into the post-apocalyptic one?
Is the end of the world a bad thing?
- In “The Star?”
- In “The Comet?”
- In other science fiction?
W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963)
- One of the most influential writers in American history across a wide variety of fields: sociology, history, literature, and beyond
- Focused on documenting the history of and advocating for African Americans in all of his work
- Wrote several works of speculative fiction (both science fiction and fantasy) that provide important early examples of Afrofuturism
Compare and contrast Wells and Du Bois’s approaches to catastrophe from space.
- What is similar?
- What is different?
- What do those differences say about the different points that the authors make in their work?
Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (AKA Begum Rokeya, 1880-1932)
- Bengali feminist writer and activist
- Born in British India; denied formal schooling, she was taught Bengali and English at home in secret by her elder brother
- Advocated for women to be educated and treated as equals
- Published “Sultana’s Dream” in 1905
Is “Sultana’s Dream” apocalyptic?
- Apocalyptic literature often communicates its messages in dreams, as in “Sultana’s Dream”
- “Sultana’s Dream” does not depict the “end of the world” in the sense of its destruction.
- But it does depict a world radically changed from the one the narrator inhabits.
- “Sultana’s Dream” legible as part of the utopian tradition
“Sultana’s Dream” and utopia
- Thomas More coined the word “utopia” in 1516.
- Utopia puns on Greek ou-topos (“no place”) and eu-topos (“good place”).
- Dystopia is the bad place. Its coinage is much later, coming into wide use only in the 1950s.7
- Utopia and dystopia are not opposites, but two sides of the same coin.
- Famous contemporary dystopias: The Hunger Games and The Handmaid’s Tale
- Handmaid’s Tale is dystopian for most people in its world, but it is utopian for totalitarian Christian theocrats (theonomists)
Ladyland, seen from the mardana
- For the women, Ladyland is a utopia. They rule, study, and walk unveiled. No crime, no epidemics, and “no one died in youth except by rare accident.”
- For the men, the zenana reversed. “How the tables are turned,” says Sultana. “But the seclusion is the same,” says Sara.
- The men of Ladyland first “took that order rather for a boon.” Then “they wanted to be free,” and petitioned the Queen, who refused them. Now they “have ceased to grumble at their seclusion.”
- Utopia reveals the world to be dystopian: Is it wise, Sara asks, “to keep sane people inside an asylum and let loose the insane?”
How are utopia, dystopia, and apocalypse related?
Revealing endings
- Greek apokalypsis means an uncovering. The end of the world is a new beginning.
- “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”8
- Du Bois essentially says the same of racism: Jim: “Death, the leveler!” Julia: “And the revealer.”
- Characters have a (denied) chance to start anew.
Do you think that utopias are optimistic or pessimistic?
- “Sultana’s Dream” imagines an end of sexism
- “The Comet” imagines an end of racism
- Both are cut short
Does each science fiction story we read for today have a novum? If so, what are they?
Today’s nova
| novum | when and where | |
|---|---|---|
| “The Star” (1897) | a mass from outer space on a collision course | “early in the twentieth century”; the whole Earth |
| “Sultana’s Dream” (1905) | Ladyland, where women rule and men are secluded | the present; somewhere else, in a dream |
| “The Comet” (1920) | the poison gas in a comet’s tail | the present; New York City |
For Thursday
- “The Fate of the Poseidonia” by Clare Winger Harris (BBSF 62)
- “The Conquest of Gola” by Leslie F. Stone (BBSF 98)
- “September 2005: The Martian” by Ray Bradbury (BBSF 164)
Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy (Wesleyan University Press, 2008).↩︎
Max Weber, Charisma and Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures, New York Review Books Classics (New York Review Books, 2019); J. R. R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories, Expanded edition, with commentary and notes, ed. Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson (HarperCollinsPublishers, 2014).↩︎
Darko Suvin, “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre,” College English 34, no. 3 (1972): 375, https://doi.org/10.2307/375141.↩︎
Marek Oziewicz, “Speculative Fiction,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 1st ed., ed. Deidre Shauna Lynch (Oxford University PressNew York, NY, 2017), https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.78.↩︎
Samuel R. Delany, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction, Rev. ed (Wesleyan University Press, 2009).↩︎
Adam Roberts, The History of Science Fiction, Second edition, Palgrave Histories of Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 185.↩︎
Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (Verso, 2005), 198.↩︎
Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 199.↩︎