Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (39 page)

(When we were in school, I didn’t even know he read fantasy, let alone write it. I don’t think he was hiding a “dirty secret” . . . it just never came up.)

In what follows, eight authors talk about the purpose of higher education and the purpose of speculative fiction. They brush on the topics of snobbery, technology, the future of education, and what happens when everyone plays well together. I find the topics infinitely fascinating, in no small part because I live, somewhat, in both worlds and find myself crossing their perceptual borders on a regular basis. And crossing borders is never a simple matter.

All in all, I very much agree with Nnedi Okorafor when she says, “It’s a complicated thing for me.”

What is the purpose of higher education? What is the purpose of speculative fiction? In what ways do the two purposes coincide and/or collide?

Julianna Baggott:
Higher education should both broaden the worldview and prepare students for the future. Speculative fiction looks into the future and primarily tells cautionary tales, even when describing utopias. So they collide in their lens set on the future, in some ways. Should they collide in the classroom for every student? No. Speculative fiction is one of many ways of looking toward the future. I think one extremely important way of looking to the future is learning the past, for example, carrying that past with you into the future.

James Enge:
I wouldn’t say anything as broad-based as higher education has a single purpose. For many, it’s job training for certain types of career. This may be the least interesting part of a university education to some observers, but it’s always been there: the medieval universities existed to grant people degrees in law and medicine, among other things. And with the hideous cost of an undergraduate education in the USA these days, these practical questions need to be addressed. What is a college education for? Is it worth the price to the people who are buying it?

But I’d say that, essentially, a university exists to preserve, increase and extend the cultural legacy. SFF is part of the cultural legacy, so their purposes are not necessarily in conflict.

Universities are institutions, though, and art doesn’t necessarily flourish in institutions. Think of the relationship between a bug-collector and bugs. The bug-collector has an intense and particular interest in capturing and studying bugs—cutting them up, mounting them on cards, working on them in labs, etc. But the bug may be more interested in just surviving and being a bug.

Brian Evenson:
For me, higher education should be able to provide students with a series of tools that make critical thinking possible. I don’t think it should be about the dissemination of knowledge (or if so only secondarily), nor is it about establishing a particular worldview, nor about positioning oneself in a particular way in regard to employment or a field. At its best [higher education] provides tools for thinking and teaches students how to use them in a way that allows for unexpected and sometimes startling results. I think speculative fiction is a place in which that critical thinking is brought to bear in a very unique and particular way, in which imagined worlds and imagined models end up allowing us to t-hink about our own world in a particular way, but also allow us to approach philosophical and ethical questions differently, and sometimes with a great deal more clarity. I don’t see that as a purpose exactly, but more as a mode. I think at their best, both higher education and speculative fiction dovetail into each other. They collide at moments when higher education becomes too insistent on doing something other than providing a series of tools and begins telling people exactly how those tools should be used. It’s particularly problematic when higher education becomes a kind of gatekeeper for maintaining the status quo and keeping certain genres and ideas “in their place.”

Jeffrey Ford:
Higher education teaches you how to answer questions; speculative fiction teaches you how to ask them. They don’t so much collide as pass through each other.

I’ve met a lot of teachers, administrators, students who were SF/F/H readers. A lot of the teachers use speculative works (film and text) in their classes. In a college writing class I taught for students with learning disabilities, I decided I was going to show them a film and have them write a review of it. This student, Antony, volunteered to bring in a movie. I was leery of this. Antony, although never malicious, acted a little wacky at times.

I told him, “Nothing too out there.”

“I got a good one,” he said.

The next week he brought in the movie and handed me the DVD case. I couldn’t believe it. He picked
Eyes Wide Shut
by Kubrick. My first thought was I’d have been better off if he’d brought in
Hostel
. Some of the students in that class couldn’t sit still for 15 minutes at a time. Forget three hours plus of
sturm und drang
. I could just picture how long they’d put up with Cruise emoting before they revolted. I saw the flick in the theater when it came out and thought it was confusing and slow; a big fizzle. I didn’t have anything else to show, though, so I put it on and settled in.

From the minute it came on, you could hear a pin drop. They were so engrossed by it that it kind of spooked me at first. Then I somehow started seeing it the way they were and got into it. Even that stuff in the mansion at the end, the corny chanting, the naked women in masks, the old dudes in robes, seemed to work. It was deep.

When it was over, we discussed it and they were full of insights about what to mention in their reviews. I couldn’t figure out what had happened. More than a few of them described the movie as “Like a fairy tale.” Others, “Like a dream.” I never saw the film as a speculative piece, but that was their portal into it. Something weird transpired in that classroom. The intersection of speculative fiction and education. Don’t ask me to quantify it. I’ve since seen the film again a couple times on cable, and both times it bored the crap out of me.

Paul Levinson:
Some of my critics have said that my scholarly work about the evolution of media is fiction, and my science fiction has so much philosophy and media theory that it reads like a scholarly tract. But that aside: The purpose of higher education is to imbue knowledge and means of learning, with entertainment being a good appetizer and dessert for that. And the purpose of speculative fiction is to entertain, with imparting a thirst for knowledge as a significant chaser. The two therefore have a lot in common. They collide only in the minds of the intellectually rigid and feeble.

Ekaterina Sedia:
I would guess that the purposes of the two are mostly orthogonal to each other, not to mention that the purposes are perceived very differently by different people. To me, higher education should be focused on providing the students with a set of higher level skills—critical thinking, information synthesis and integration, along with the usual acquisition of facts and perspectives. For speculative fiction—I wouldn’t say that its purpose is terribly different from fiction in general, since even speculative fiction is still mostly about human condition. So perhaps speculative fiction should challenge the readers by talking about people in impossible circumstances.

So I suppose one could argue that both fiction and education really are about widening and challenging the subject’s frames of references.

Joan Slonczewski:
In my book
The Highest Frontier
, student-athletes go up to Frontera College on a space station, and discover how to save the world through science. An excellent adventure, with lots to think on—that’s the purpose of speculative fiction.

The purpose of education is to explain and to inspire. To explain how the natural world works—and to inspire students to discover new worlds. Unfortunately, much of today’s science education fails at both. Explaining things requires good storytelling, so that the student remembers how a sugar molecule breaks down and why it’s of compelling importance. Yet the average textbook makes the topic both boring and incomprehensible.

Scientists don’t realize how much of what we teach is fictional illustration, such as the ball and stick model of a molecule. If we have to teach that much story, why not teach more?

Do you encounter snobbery from either realm toward the other? If so, why do you suppose that is? And how does it manifest itself?

Julianna Baggott:
I really don’t know many sci-fi/fantasy/speculative fiction writers. I know many academics. And, yes, there is snobbery. Not just snobbery, I get end-of-year evaluations and I’m told the kind of work of mine that my colleagues would want to see more of. My fantasy work is never suggested.
Pure
is not on my academic CV, and neither will be the sequels. I’m writing the
Pure
Trilogy—which I think of as dystopian fiction instead of falling into the strict boundaries of sci-fi—
for myself
. I don’t see them as part of my creative scholarship and I don’t want to put my colleagues in the situation of evaluating them for promotion. I have plenty of works that I create that fit more neatly in the academic environment.

James Enge:
I haven’t gotten any snobbery from academia towards my sword-and-sorcery. Most of my colleagues at my university were unaware of my fantasy-writing until I was nominated for the World Fantasy Award a year or two ago. And a lot of people were genuinely, I think, excited by it. My novels are now proudly on display in the faculty publications display case, alongside much more serious work.

Sometimes I sense some—I don’t know what to call it—anti-snobbery from the other direction. When someone at a con learns that I teach college, they may get anxious, as if I’m about to assign them homework or give them a failing grade in Somethingorother 101.

And often I see fans waxing hysterical online about academia and its lack of respect for genre. It’s clear to me that those guys don’t have the faintest clue what they’re talking about. I would give them an A in Strawman-Fighting and an F in Reality-Dealing, if I had the power to do so.

Brian Evenson:
I’ve mainly encountered it on the part of academics. It manifests sometimes as a kind of embarrassment on the part of academics that I’ve done not only “literary” work, but work that is “genre”-related. They see it as a kind of shameful secret, like a heroin-addicted uncle or something. But I love my heroin-addicted uncle. The worst was someone who felt he had to draw me aside and explain to me that I was wasting my time by not doing strictly literary work and that it would ruin my reputation. That felt intensely snobbish. Then again, lots of academics find it interesting that I cross that line and are supportive of it and me.

Jeffrey Ford:
I guess somebody’s got to be a snob. As far as I’m concerned, though, they can gladly have the mantle. The position seems too stressful to me. There are so many different kinds of readers with so many different tastes that it would be a job and a half to come up with standards that might encompass all those minds in their idiosyncratic engagements with text. Less is more when it comes to standards. You’ll head for the territory if you have any sense. To be fair, Snob’s a tough job because you have to keep giving a shit long after nobody else does. How does it manifest itself? Obeisance to the Precious.

Paul Levinson:
I’ve seen a touch of snobbery from both sides. In academe, it comes from a narrow view that learning has to be difficult, and too much joy in anything may make it suspect. In speculative fiction, it comes from a suspicion of anything that inhabits a classroom. In both cases, again, the snobbery is a sign of a shaky mind.

Nnedi Okorafor:
I’ve encountered both. But I’ve encountered the snobbery more in academia. I think it’s because a lot of academics have not read good speculative fiction. They are basing their snobbery on cliches and stereotypes. That’s not good research. It manifests itself on syllabuses. Professors won’t put speculative novels/stories on them. It manifests itself in the absence of speculative novels/stories in the literary canon. It manifests itself in the stipulations professors impose in creative writing classes. And let’s not ignore the major literary prizes that snub their noses at speculative fiction.

Ekaterina Sedia:
In my experience, some individuals from popular fiction writing circles conceive of academia as beret-wearing snobs who read Joyce just to torture themselves. This concept often co-occurs with claims of “it’s all about the story” and “I read (or write) to be entertained (or to entertain).” It seems to be a defensive reaction, claiming that SF gets no respect because of academic snobbery. Of course, it does get plenty of respect (and then stops being shelved in the genre section of the bookstore, but that’s another story). I also suspect that there are academics who look down on all sorts of popular fiction, I just haven’t met any.

Joan Slonczewski:
Checking the science is an important part of assessing science fiction. But ultimately what matters is, how does the work make us
think
? In H. G. Wells’s
The Time Machine
, the science is all a century out of date. But the essential questions he raises remain: Could the human species diverge? And would we still be human?

What’s it like when these two worlds—academia and speculative fiction—coexist? When they play well together?

Julianna Baggott:
I’m sure there are universities that do embrace all of it. In fact, I’ve heard that one of our nanobiology specialists teaches science fiction at the end of his own course in the sciences. You know what helps? People like Margaret Atwood. Academics can wrap their heads around the literary importance of her work.

James Enge:
SFF now has a cultural legacy long enough that it needs some tending and preservation. That’s what academia does best. Mur Lafferty wrote a brief squib a while ago (”My Problem with Classics”) about how unpleasant some of the older work in the field was for her. Blogospheric squawking ensued, but I think she raised a very real issue. Some of this older stuff, written as popular fiction and meant to speak directly to a contemporary audience, no longer works as intended because the audience has changed. The marketplace that produced this work is likely to discard it in favor of things more likely to make money nowadays. But universities provide a place for this stuff to be preserved, studied, appreciated, interpreted—independent of the harsh and shifting currents of the fiction markets.