CP: You teach courses on both fantasy and science fiction. Does the pairing of these genres make sense to you from a standpoint of literary study?
JK: I enjoy teaching both courses. I think they do complement each other, though fantasy is much easier to fit within literature as it is understood in the academy than science fiction is. Fantasy finds a sanction in many works of pre-Enlightenment literature. Lots of medievalists get into fantasy. But not many high lit types appreciate science fiction.
Both forms of fiction violate the canons of realism. But at the extremes, I think they are very different in origin and effect. High fantasy tends to turn its back on the present, is often anti-technology, usually maintains that change is bad or at least suspect until proven otherwise, that the old ways are the best, that knowledge is dangerous.
Science fiction tends to take the opposite position on every one of these premises. Tolkien disliked science fiction. He said of it, “These prophets often foretell (and many seem to yearn for) a world like one big glass-roofed railway-station….it is indeed an age of ‘improved means to deteriorated ends.’” He added that in a fantasy world, “one cannot conceive of a house built with a good purpose—as inn, a hostel for travellers, the hall of a virtuous and noble king—that is yet sickeningly ugly. At the present day it would be rash to hope to see one that was not—unless it was built before our time.”
Now there is plenty of hideous modern architecture, but I suggest that Tolkien never saw the Chrysler Building, for instance, or a Frank Lloyd Wright house—or if he did he could not really see them because they were not half-timbered, with thatched roofs. This reactionary attitude is everywhere in fantasy, even in writers who, unlike Tolkien, grew up in less traditional and more democratic situations. It’s a viewpoint that I dislike, and prevents my wholehearted acceptance of that sort of fantasy, leaves me enjoying my science fiction class more than my fantasy class.
Not to say that I am not critical of science and technology (my fiction is full of critiques), but I guess I am more comfortably a child of the 20th century than Tolkien. I have the basic SF attitude.
CP: How is teaching a course on speculative fiction different from teaching a course on “regular” literature?
JK: The audience is different. I get many students in SF and fantasy who would not otherwise take an English course. This has its upside and downside. I often have to bring them along in the analysis of the work. Some of them resist the idea that this work can be read for social, cultural, esthetic purposes.
On the other hand, I don’t have to sell the prospect of reading the work as hard. One of the great virtues of SF and fantasy is that they have volunteer readers. I don’t want my courses to kill the experience of reading SF. People come to these genres for good reasons, and I want to celebrate that as well as analyze it.
I really like the enthusiasm most of my students show. They care about what we read, even when they dislike it. We have some good give-and-take, some worthwhile arguments.
CP: Do you find that your students are generally a pretty self-selecting group, and have read a good deal of speculative fiction already, or do you get any students who really haven’t done much reading in the genre on their own?
JK: Most of them have read a good deal of speculative fiction, but not in any organized way. They don’t usually have a good sense of the history of either genre. In SF, more and more of them seem to have their acquaintance determined by movies and TV. They haven’t ever read Heinlein, never heard of Sturgeon or Van Vogt.
In fantasy they are pretty much all have read Tolkien and some have read lots of Tolkien’s imitators. Sword and Sorcery. But they seldom have thought of Carroll as a fantasy writer, and never would think of Kafka as one. In an ironic way, the high art scholars of the academy and the pulp fans both have the same view of fantasy—that Tolkien defines it, and that if it ain’t like Tolkien, it ain’t fantasy. Dragons, wizards, swords, elves, quests, magic—yes. Travelling salesman turns into a cockroach—no. How you can see “The Metamorphosis” as something other than fantasy is a mystery to me.
CP: Do you bring in other types of media to your courses—film, television, graphic novels—and if so, how do you work them into the course?
JK: I tend not to do so, although I make references to visual SF all the time in order to explain a concept or technique. I did teach a graduate multidisciplinary studies seminar on postmodern SF one time, and in that course I taught five films along with the texts. I think they were 2001, Blade Runner, Videodrome, The Brother From Another Planet, and Brazil.
CP: There’s a common perception that there’s some animosity—or at least suspicion—between the speculative fiction and academic communities. Do you find that you have to justify being an academic to speculative fiction fans, or that you have to justify being a writer of science fiction to academics? How do you negotiate between those two communities?
JK: I think there is a lot of condescension toward SF and fantasy among academics. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been introduced to academics as a professor of American literature and creative writing from NCSU, and the minute they are told I am a science fiction writer, their eyes glaze over. And a scholar of SF or fantasy stands in relation to a scholar of Shakespeare and Joyce as a writer of pulp SF stands in relation to Shakespeare and Joyce themselves.
I used to think that this would change in my lifetime, but I am convinced that it will not. The postmodernists seemed for a time to be bringing some serious critical interest to SF, but that’s only because they were discrediting the entire idea of the canon. They don’t think of SF as art, or if they do it’s because they reject the entire idea of high art.
To deal with this, when I teach a normal survey of 20th century American literature, I try to include some genre work, and treat it as if it belongs. I show that it is just another part of the discourse that is literature in the twentieth century. It’s good to have separate courses for SF and fantasy, but I’m convinced that as long as such work is confined to separate courses, it will never be seen as in conversation with the rest of literature. If I could make one change in the way contemporary lit is taught, I would insist that all surveys contain some detective fiction, some SF, some fantasy. Raymond Chandler has made it into some American Lit survey texts, but C. M. Kornbluth is still invisible.
Some of my students are suspicious of the academic study of SF: the classic statement of this attitude is “Let’s get SF out of the classroom and back into the gutter where it belongs.” Their opinions are fairly common in the SF fandom world; fans often don’t like the literary approach to speculative fiction. My students sometimes tell me that I’m taking the fun out of the books, or that I’m overanalyzing them, or that what I’m talking about in my analysis “isn’t really what the book’s about.” But I have much more success convincing such fans that it’s okay to take SF seriously than I have convincing Milton scholars it’s okay to take SF seriously.
Most of the people on my faculty at NCSU who know me, know differently, and treat me with respect, but I have to say I think that’s more a result of knowing me personally than it is from respect for the genre. The problem with SF is that most people who know nothing about it think they know all about it without ever having studied it.
CP: It’s interesting that your students sometimes think that analyzing a book takes the fun out of it. I used to teach college-level music theory, and my students would tell me the same thing—that analyzing a work of music takes the fun, or the magic, out of it.
JK: I also run into a similar idea in my writing classes; my students will tell me that they can’t write if they’re thinking about it analytically. I’m sympathetic, but if you want to get better at writing, you need to be analytical.
CP: How does your experience as a science fiction writer help you in teaching science fiction? Do you ever teach your own books?
I have never assigned one of my own books, but I have assigned the Norton book and Modern Classics of SF, which both have stories by me in them. I don’t always assign those stories, though sometimes at the end of discussion of those books I’m happy to answer questions about the stories.