This Rough Power: Reading and Writing Science Fiction
Science fiction (SF) has been called many things, such as the literature of ideas, 90 percent rubbish, and the 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 one name a collage of works that, at first glance, have almost nothing in common with each other. 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 set out on our own 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, such as the literature of ideas, 90 percent rubbish, and the 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 one name a collage of works that, at first glance, have almost nothing in common with each other. 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 set out on our own 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 students in Session 1 really got into a word-substitution exercise meant to clearly delineate the ways complex language can either create or compromise the writer's link to the reader. They were quick to spot how the construction of alternative vocabularies—a common feature of both science fiction and fantasy literature—becomes recursive, a trait which can make a world more immersive at the cost of clarity.
The whole class latched onto the idea of science fiction confronting the unknown precisely because we are not sure what is unknowable (i.e., what might be possible tomorrow). This interest in the strange as prior to the scientific showed itself in their stories, most of which dealt more in questions and mysterious happenings than in straight answers. In general, the science took a back seat to examining how people might react in different circumstances or when given new abilities.
Given this investment in producing literature with a strong human-interest factor, building a whole story was a bit tricky within the time constraints—one of the hardest parts of writing even short fiction is precisely orchestrating the relationship between the overall premise and the small group of characters at the heart of the narrative, and consequently many students' pieces struggled to leave the early stages of narrative setup or else never quite bridged the gap between the realized beginning and envisioned end. Still, everyone ended with something worthy of further development and exploration. Peer feedback was often on-point, and the critiques offered suggestions for refinement and new direction.
The following works are suggested for further reading and/or viewing:
The students in Session 1 really got into a word-substitution exercise meant to clearly delineate the ways complex language can either create or compromise the writer's link to the reader. They were quick to spot how the construction of alternative vocabularies—a common feature of both science fiction and fantasy literature—becomes recursive, a trait which can make a world more immersive at the cost of clarity.
The whole class latched onto the idea of science fiction confronting the unknown precisely because we are not sure what is unknowable (i.e., what might be possible tomorrow). This interest in the strange as prior to the scientific showed itself in their stories, most of which dealt more in questions and mysterious happenings than in straight answers. In general, the science took a back seat to examining how people might react in different circumstances or when given new abilities.
Given this investment in producing literature with a strong human-interest factor, building a whole story was a bit tricky within the time constraints—one of the hardest parts of writing even short fiction is precisely orchestrating the relationship between the overall premise and the small group of characters at the heart of the narrative, and consequently many students' pieces struggled to leave the early stages of narrative setup or else never quite bridged the gap between the realized beginning and envisioned end. Still, everyone ended with something worthy of further development and exploration. Peer feedback was often on-point, and the critiques offered suggestions for refinement and new direction.
The following works are suggested for further reading and/or viewing:
- Isaac Asimov’s robot and Foundation stories
- Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain
- Frank Herbert’s Dune
- Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
- Primer (caution for language)
- Arrival
- The Thing from Another World (1951)
- The Martian (caution for language)
- The Twilight Zone
Session 2 Parent Letter
The students in Session 2 really took to adapting methods from film to written media, particularly the control of atmosphere and information exemplified in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. They loved watching scenes and breaking down what made each one tick afterward—from the soundtrack cues to characters’ responses to new or strange situations. Several students also enjoyed comparing the climactic scene of Star Wars: A New Hope to its counterpart in The Force Awakens and figuring out why the latter, for all its slick special effects work, does not take the time to build the same narrative structure that keeps the original compelling even after 40 years.
The class quickly grasped the idea of science fiction as a chance to explore human behavior in extremis. Most of their stories involved some dramatic—and usually disheartening—change in the world to which their protagonists had to adapt to survive, or else followed a character through an unprecedented personal crisis. Their proposed solutions to the classic shapeshifter scenario (as in John Carpenter's The Thing and every third episode of Star Trek) that ranged from the silly to the meticulously planned, but they all reflected how the best and worst of humanity finds itself represented in moments of crisis for which no known paradigm offers a solution.
The students overall took less naturally to incorporating realistic (or sometimes even plausible) scientific/technological change into their stories. Most chose to focus on setting instead: an alien invasion, the rise of a dystopian state, an ecological disaster. Most of their scenarios concerned change as something that happens to people as opposed to something that people do; even the dystopian stories tended (with a notable exception or two) toward scenarios in which main characters shared no culpability, and the causes for the new order seldom saw much explication. But this is as much a limit of the short story genre as anything else. A few thousand words can only accommodate so much story and explanation, and most students still found ways to explore intriguing "what if" scenarios.
Still, for students who are interested, I would encourage some deeper continuing researches into how we shape the world we live in and how we enter into reciprocal relationships with our own instruments of power.
The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke
The students in Session 2 really took to adapting methods from film to written media, particularly the control of atmosphere and information exemplified in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. They loved watching scenes and breaking down what made each one tick afterward—from the soundtrack cues to characters’ responses to new or strange situations. Several students also enjoyed comparing the climactic scene of Star Wars: A New Hope to its counterpart in The Force Awakens and figuring out why the latter, for all its slick special effects work, does not take the time to build the same narrative structure that keeps the original compelling even after 40 years.
The class quickly grasped the idea of science fiction as a chance to explore human behavior in extremis. Most of their stories involved some dramatic—and usually disheartening—change in the world to which their protagonists had to adapt to survive, or else followed a character through an unprecedented personal crisis. Their proposed solutions to the classic shapeshifter scenario (as in John Carpenter's The Thing and every third episode of Star Trek) that ranged from the silly to the meticulously planned, but they all reflected how the best and worst of humanity finds itself represented in moments of crisis for which no known paradigm offers a solution.
The students overall took less naturally to incorporating realistic (or sometimes even plausible) scientific/technological change into their stories. Most chose to focus on setting instead: an alien invasion, the rise of a dystopian state, an ecological disaster. Most of their scenarios concerned change as something that happens to people as opposed to something that people do; even the dystopian stories tended (with a notable exception or two) toward scenarios in which main characters shared no culpability, and the causes for the new order seldom saw much explication. But this is as much a limit of the short story genre as anything else. A few thousand words can only accommodate so much story and explanation, and most students still found ways to explore intriguing "what if" scenarios.
Still, for students who are interested, I would encourage some deeper continuing researches into how we shape the world we live in and how we enter into reciprocal relationships with our own instruments of power.
The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke