A Very Good Place to Start: An Introduction

The arrival of spring in my junior year of college meant that it was time to register for classes in my senior year. Now entering my seventh semester of being an English major, I had grown weary of the literary canon; Shakespeare had been examined, the great poets had been dissected, and the classic novels had been close read. I came to the startling realization that now, at the end of my journey with English in an undergraduate context, I was falling out of love with reading – nothing was exciting me anymore.

Taking in the schedule of classes for the fall, something caught my eye… “Cold War Science Fictions.” They taught sci-fi in an academic context? Curiosity got the better of me, and I enrolled in the class. A few months passed, and into my e-mail inbox came the syllabus. My interest was piqued, to say the least. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Okay, the inspiration for Blade Runner…heard of it. The Dispossessed – I’ve at least heard of LeGuin. But….Glass Bees? Solaris? Roadside Picnic? What is all this stuff? Well, that’s what I get for something cross-listed with the German department, I guess. Nonetheless, I had a sense of excitement that I hadn’t really had in a while; sci-fi was my guilty pleasure, my hidden love, my shame as a scholar of “serious” literature. Nestled deep within that syllabus was a cheeky instruction to e-mail our professor what our favorite piece of science fiction media was, and I waxed poetic about my lifelong love of Star Wars, though I admitted I wasn’t exactly sure if it was “real” science fiction.

Our first reading assignment was not a novel, but a series of essays by science fiction scholars about the limits of the genre. I immediately came to realize that I was going to have my ideas challenged this semester; I became ashamed of my own shame about how much I loved sci-fi when I listened to the likes of Darko Suvin and Samuel Delany defend the genre. From its inception, I learned, sci-fi was viewed as a kind of pulp literature, something to be written off as dream-fodder for pimple-faced teens and untrustworthy adults. Suddenly, a lot of things, most especially my lifelong draw to science fiction, began to make sense. My whole life, I’d been written off for being “other.” I was a girl, girls can’t be Jedi for Halloween. Girls can’t be good writers. I was a lesbian. I was a little bit socially awkward. My shame turned to anger when I realized that a genre built by and for people like me, “othered” people, had been gatekept from me simply because some guy in a cardigan with a PhD in Chaucer said that anything with a spaceship in it isn’t “real” literature. And so my dedication to taking back what was mine began.

Not only did I voraciously read everything for class, but I started taking weekend trips to used bookstores and buying up things that interested me. When I walked up to the cashier with my arms full of Ray Bradbury and Frank Herbert, I actually felt a sense of pride. I was working hard both in and out of class, and I felt like a little girl plowing through books in my spare time yet again.

Admittedly, I did still harbor shame about some of my preconceived notions regarding my classmates; my guilt about liking things that weren’t “scholarly” manifested into assumptions that my peers would be girls with blue hair and guys who only wanted to derail our discussions to be about Star Trek. Actually, one of my classmates did have blue hair – and she was brilliant. And a lot of the guys were nerdy – but so was I! Studying English for so long had led me to a kind of academic island, such that I had been trained for so long to pick apart literature and write essays about my own ideas…did I know how to work collaboratively anymore?

One of our first written assignments was to do a close reading of a passage from Glass Bees – to my horror, we were split into groups, and were told that next class, we were going to meet up in these groups and create something that was a conglomeration of all of our ideas about the passage. I was in a group with only 3 other boys, and I hadn’t spoken much in class up to that point because I was very afraid of saying the wrong thing. When all was said and done though, the world didn’t end; Tony, Vinh, and Julian were actually very interested in my ideas, and I theirs.

Though this experience gave me a much-needed reality check about respecting my peers and myself, I was still terrified of speaking in front of the whole class. I never much liked the sound of my own voice, and I very much am afraid of judgment, so though I poured my heart and soul into my response posts for class, I mostly kept quiet. Then, our professor informed us that as a way of tracking our progress through the semester, we would need to set participation goals for ourselves and then self-assess them at the end of the semester. I decided this was the perfect opportunity to challenge myself, so I set a goal of making an effort to make some kind of contribution to every class…and I did.

The semester wore on, and I learned more and more about science fiction and its history, especially in a European Cold War context. It wasn’t really pulp at all, but rather was a means of encouraging young men all across the Soviet Union to pursue careers in STEM. In Europe, science fiction wasn’t a laughingstock at all – it was a serious and important means of self-expression, and even a kind of service to the government.

As the semester neared its closed, we began one of our last novels: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin. This novel awakened something in me. LeGuin wrote like she wasn’t afraid of what anyone had to say about her work; she wrote fearlessly and with no regard for what was “right” or “wrong” with regard to either the genre or the conventions of literature. This novel puts out the question of what perfection means, and if it’s even really possible, and the best part is the fact that LeGuin herself doesn’t propose to know.

I’ve come to understand, both frustratingly and excitingly, that science fiction is not the literature of answers, but of questions. Sci-fi asks “what if?,” but doesn’t set out to answer it. The spirit of the genre is exploration and discovery. Authors create universes for readers to explore, and there is no right or wrong way for this interaction to happen.

I think I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that my time in Cold War Science Fictions occurred with a backdrop of a global pandemic. Having to learn remotely creates a real barrier to learning, but as a class, we conquered this obstacle together. In the scariest, most isolating time of my life, science fiction found me, and I don’t think this was a coincidence. At a time where the only place I went besides my own house was the grocery store, a world of opportunity spread out before me – many worlds, in fact. This semester, I met an eccentric and mysterious toymaker, bounty hunted androids, made contact with a sentient ocean, scored swag from the Zone, shared the secrets of time and space with the entire universe, and played vlet. And I didn’t even have to leave my house.

I’m hesitant to close out this small story that is serving to introduce my ideas with thank yous, as if done wrong they reek of hollow kissassery, but I’m going to do so anyway. To my peers: thank you for challenging me every class, and for encouraging me to speak up about my own ideas. You are all brilliant in your own unique ways, and I have found great joy and comfort in learning alongside you. To my professor, Carl Gelderloos: your mastery of a genre we have all grown to love is unmatched, but more importantly, in a time where nothing felt stable, your empathy and warmth were a constant. You taught me so much about a subject I now have grown to love so deeply, but also showed me such great kindness when I stumbled in the face of adversity. We are all better for having known and learned from you. Lastly, to authors and readers of science fiction both near and far, thank you. Without the bravery of authors in the face of criticism and ridicule, there would be no body of work for us to study. And without people to care about that writing, to read it, to care about it, to discuss it, there would be no point in writing it.

My journey this semester was about science fiction, but it really was more than that. The genre of discovery brought me on a journey of self-discovery, and on the pages that follow here are the ideas it gave to me.