Why is science fiction one of the "arts" in a class on Women, Art and Culture?When is science fiction feminist? What work can SF do for feminist movement?
What about calling it SF? When is it science fiction, speculative fiction or fantasy? To whom does that matter?
These are some questions to explore in lecture, in section, talking to folks inside and outside of class, on the web and on your own.
• Webbing: Archives/Feminist SF, Fantasy and Utopia
[The Butler interview begins about 40 mins. into the show, and you can move the cursor on the YouTube clip there if you want to skip ahead.]
In this interview with Charlie Rose, Octavia Butler says that in learning to write SF "you got to make your own worlds, you got you write yourself in." "I write about people and the different ways of being human." Butler tells Rose that all the "horrible little jobs" Dana has had in Kindred are all the jobs she's done herself. She's says that her MacArthur grant resulted in people paying more attention to her work when before they thought "it was that science fiction garbage." She says that what readers bring to her work, what's important to them, is as important as what she puts into it. She calls learning new stuff "sending my mind off someplace it hasn't been before." "I'm not sure if I'm optimistic or pessimistic, I know we can do better than we have, because there are times we have done better... but I don't know if we will. I know I want us to do better...."
Making worlds is what SF, be it science fiction or speculative fiction, is about.
This is a conceptual map of relationships among various forms of fiction including science fiction and speculative fiction, together with magical realism, fantasy, horror, alternate history, metafiction, all within fiction, especially mimetic (representational) fiction. It was created by Claire Light, a writer and teacher of writing who blogs about mapping and geography at atlas(t), and in the post this image comes from, Map of Speculative Fiction, says this is a generally accepted version of these based on content.In contrast, SF writer, critic and theorist Samuel R. ("Chip") Delany, another of the relative few famous black SF authors, says the difference between what he calls "mundane fiction" and SF is all in how you read it. This argument suggests that one reason some people don't like SF is that they haven't learned how to read it: you do this differently than the stuff you are used to. (See Delany's books The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and Starboard Wine for essays about all this. A useful summary is Spencer's review "Vintage Delany," for Science Fiction Studies.)
For example: in "mundane fiction" you read a sentence -- "Her world exploded" -- and you know it indicates a woman in great anguish as she reels emotionally from something terrible.
mundane fiction: Her world exploded
But in SF, while this may be the case too, it means something more, something about an alternative world in which this sentence is not only metaphorical, it is also quite literal:
Here is Princess Leia in Star Wars, forced to watch her home world Aldaran destroyed by the evil empire's terrible weapon the Death Star, as a punishment for her refusal to divulge the location of those working against the empire at the Rebel Base:
sf: Her world exploded
====
====
Here is how Spencer summarizes Delany's argument, saying that SF
"emphasizes the object, the exterior world. As a result, we interpret the two sorts of texts according to two very different sets of assumptions.
[Quoting Delany]: Because the world of mundane fiction is fixed, at least in comparison with the multiple worlds of science fiction, when we read some distortion in the representation of the world in a piece of mundane fiction we are led to the questions, Why did the character (the fictive subject) perceive it this way? or Why did the writer (the auctorial subject) present it this way? (p. 145)
"By contrast, because of SF's characteristic focus upon the object world, when we encounter a detail which differs dramatically from our ordinary present, we ask instead, "How would the world of the story have to be different from our world in order for this to occur? " (p. 146)
"Science fiction is far more concerned with the organization (and reorganization) of the object, i.e., the world, or the institutions through which we perceive it. It is concerned with the subject, certainly, but concerned with those aspects of it that are closer to the object: How is the subject excited, impinged on, contoured and constituted by the object? How might beings with a different social organization, environment, brain structure, and body perceive things? How might humans perceive things after becoming acclimated to an alien environment? (p. 188)"
