This Rough Power: Reading and Writing Science Fiction (Andrew Dykstal)
Science fiction (SF) has been called many things: the literature of ideas, 90 percent rubbish, a successor to the Gothic. The genre includes everything from Star Trek to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to Neuromancer to The Island of Dr. Moreau, collecting under a single label a collage of works that, at first glance, have almost nothing in common with one another. The enormous area enclosed by SF—and the constant efforts of artists to expand it—suggests the richness at the heart of the question SF usually attempts to answer: “What if?” We’ll engage this question by examining how changes in technology (social, industrial, practical) change both our lives and the stories we tell about them. To that end, we’ll combine experiences of short-form SF works, experiments in how we use technology, and our own exploratory writing projects. Over the course of the class, each student will develop an understanding of a few touchstones in the field of SF, the history of science, and the craft of writing. They will finish with new tools for interdisciplinary thinking, a new body of knowledge about the world, and a draft of their own creative project—likely a short story or screenplay.
Science fiction (SF) has been called many things: the literature of ideas, 90 percent rubbish, a successor to the Gothic. The genre includes everything from Star Trek to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to Neuromancer to The Island of Dr. Moreau, collecting under a single label a collage of works that, at first glance, have almost nothing in common with one another. The enormous area enclosed by SF—and the constant efforts of artists to expand it—suggests the richness at the heart of the question SF usually attempts to answer: “What if?” We’ll engage this question by examining how changes in technology (social, industrial, practical) change both our lives and the stories we tell about them. To that end, we’ll combine experiences of short-form SF works, experiments in how we use technology, and our own exploratory writing projects. Over the course of the class, each student will develop an understanding of a few touchstones in the field of SF, the history of science, and the craft of writing. They will finish with new tools for interdisciplinary thinking, a new body of knowledge about the world, and a draft of their own creative project—likely a short story or screenplay.
Session 1 Parent Letter
The short films and clips from Close Encounters of the Third Kind engaged the critical faculties of students in Session 1—there was considerable consternation at protagonists' irrational behavior—and reflected the dry humor often inherent in the human struggle to handle unprecedented situations. The subtle absurdism lurking in the background of many of the readings and clips asserted itself more strongly in many students' projects, sometimes to humorous effect, sometimes in shades of Lovecraftian horror.
Accordingly, the students quickly grasped the strangeness or alienation that features in quite a bit of science fiction. Many of their stories followed in the lines of Franz Kafka and Albert Camus, wherein characters found themselves caught in situations or circumstances beyond the possibility of explanation, at least within the narrative frame. The more conventional stories tended to center on questions of identity—how does one think of one's identity as a cyborg, for example—and on dystopian themes.
Students in Session 1 took less strongly to the scientific side—that is, to the carefully controlled treatment of how a specific technology or environmental change could impact human life. Some of this is due to the limited opportunities for in-class research. Some, I suspect, is simply because that type of story is rather difficult to write without a good bit of life experience in both a technical field and in watching all sorts of human interactions. Whatever the reason, many students took more to speculative fiction than its scientific subcategory, an inclination with which I can fully sympathize. Whatever his or her particular preference, though, each student left with the core of an idea worthy of further development.
The following works are suggested for further reading and/or viewing:
The short films and clips from Close Encounters of the Third Kind engaged the critical faculties of students in Session 1—there was considerable consternation at protagonists' irrational behavior—and reflected the dry humor often inherent in the human struggle to handle unprecedented situations. The subtle absurdism lurking in the background of many of the readings and clips asserted itself more strongly in many students' projects, sometimes to humorous effect, sometimes in shades of Lovecraftian horror.
Accordingly, the students quickly grasped the strangeness or alienation that features in quite a bit of science fiction. Many of their stories followed in the lines of Franz Kafka and Albert Camus, wherein characters found themselves caught in situations or circumstances beyond the possibility of explanation, at least within the narrative frame. The more conventional stories tended to center on questions of identity—how does one think of one's identity as a cyborg, for example—and on dystopian themes.
Students in Session 1 took less strongly to the scientific side—that is, to the carefully controlled treatment of how a specific technology or environmental change could impact human life. Some of this is due to the limited opportunities for in-class research. Some, I suspect, is simply because that type of story is rather difficult to write without a good bit of life experience in both a technical field and in watching all sorts of human interactions. Whatever the reason, many students took more to speculative fiction than its scientific subcategory, an inclination with which I can fully sympathize. Whatever his or her particular preference, though, each student left with the core of an idea worthy of further development.
The following works are suggested for further reading and/or viewing:
- China Miéville’s Embassytown and The City & The City
- Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed
- Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
- William Gibson’s Neuromancer
- Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash
- H.P. Lovecraft’s The Haunter of the Dark and The Colour Out of Space
- Don DeLillo’s White Noise
- Primer
- Coherence (caution for language and a moment of rather intense violence)
- Alien (1979) (caution for people having their faces attacked by alien embryos)
- Travelling Salesman
- The Martian
- Deep Impact
- Contact (caution for sheer Carl Sagan pretentiousness)
Session 2 Parent Letter
The Session 2 students really took to giving and receiving small group feedback on their writing—so much so that I plan on incorporating more of it for the final setting. Overall, they did a marvelous job of preserving a collegial atmosphere and providing one another with useful suggestions.
The class was understandably divided on whether they wanted more writing time or more genre examples, but everyone who was serious about getting a story committed to paper thoroughly impressed me with the volume and quality of their written work. For all that they enjoyed the games and critical side of the class, the most common piece of written feedback the students gave me was that they loved inventing and developing their story ideas.
The students quickly internalized a point of writing craft applicable across genres: start the story in the middle. They sorted out the changes they wanted to drive their stories, plotted how these changes would impact their characters, and dropped the reader right into the thick of things. This en medias res approach dovetailed well with the overall theme of thinking about change and how it forces people to adapt. Most of the class devised characters caught in moments of transformation, and they did a fine job of giving the reader an immediate and personal vantage point on that key moment.
The class was slower to develop high-concept stories in which a change in the world or in technology drove some key turn in the plot itself rather than merely providing a backdrop. Most of the readings for the course centered on this technique, but it's a tricky feat to pull off, especially for a comparatively new writer.
Most students negotiated the problem by writing more character-driven stories—a move than in turn creates its own challenges, such as putting together psychologically complex characters with realistic dialogue, motivations, and thought processes. We worked through a few writing tricks and techniques to smooth off rough edges, especially in dialogue, but I'd highly recommend that interested students keep reading their Clarke, Asimov, and Niven for stories in which science (or broadly scientific thought) not only occasions the plot but drives it.
How to Talk to Girls at Parties
The Session 2 students really took to giving and receiving small group feedback on their writing—so much so that I plan on incorporating more of it for the final setting. Overall, they did a marvelous job of preserving a collegial atmosphere and providing one another with useful suggestions.
The class was understandably divided on whether they wanted more writing time or more genre examples, but everyone who was serious about getting a story committed to paper thoroughly impressed me with the volume and quality of their written work. For all that they enjoyed the games and critical side of the class, the most common piece of written feedback the students gave me was that they loved inventing and developing their story ideas.
The students quickly internalized a point of writing craft applicable across genres: start the story in the middle. They sorted out the changes they wanted to drive their stories, plotted how these changes would impact their characters, and dropped the reader right into the thick of things. This en medias res approach dovetailed well with the overall theme of thinking about change and how it forces people to adapt. Most of the class devised characters caught in moments of transformation, and they did a fine job of giving the reader an immediate and personal vantage point on that key moment.
The class was slower to develop high-concept stories in which a change in the world or in technology drove some key turn in the plot itself rather than merely providing a backdrop. Most of the readings for the course centered on this technique, but it's a tricky feat to pull off, especially for a comparatively new writer.
Most students negotiated the problem by writing more character-driven stories—a move than in turn creates its own challenges, such as putting together psychologically complex characters with realistic dialogue, motivations, and thought processes. We worked through a few writing tricks and techniques to smooth off rough edges, especially in dialogue, but I'd highly recommend that interested students keep reading their Clarke, Asimov, and Niven for stories in which science (or broadly scientific thought) not only occasions the plot but drives it.
How to Talk to Girls at Parties