I think my experience as a writer comes into the course frequently. Sometimes I will make reference to biographical details of contemporary writers that I know because I know the writers. I will often stress that SF is a living literature written by ordinary people, and that students can meet and talk to these writers if they want. I have sent copies of papers written by students (with the students’ permission) to writers I know.
More generally, I think I can convey something of the mindset of a science fiction writer to them. How an SF writer thinks about the world, “where she gets her crazy ideas.”
CP: You also teach creative writing. Do you ever teach courses on writing speculative fiction per se? If not, how do you use speculative fiction in a more general creative writing class?
JK: We don’t have a course dedicated to writing SF, but we do have a graduate seminar that has various topics, and three times I have taught “Writing Non-Realistic Fiction” under that rubric. In that class I talk about writing different sorts of fantasy, metafiction, and science fiction.
I allow and even encourage my students to write speculative fiction in my regular writing classes. In keeping with what I said about treating genre fiction as acceptable in lit surveys, I try to include at least some genre stories on the reading list for my fiction writing classes. I hold students writing SF to the same standards I keep for any student writer, but I also think I have many things to say to those students who want to write SF. I can draw on my expertise there a little more than I can for those students writing mainstream fiction.
CP: From the point of view of teaching the art and craft of writing fiction, are there any important differences between learning to write speculative fiction and learning to write in general?
JK: I think the standard techniques of fiction writing are the same. Plotting, character development, motivation, prose style, significant detail—all these standards apply equally to SF and non-SF. An SF writer has some additional things to think about—creating an consistent future, say, or how to represent an imaginary landscape—that a writer of non-SF may not address so directly or often.
There is a difference in the way you think, however. To write good SF, you much be more aware of the contingency of your cultural circumstances. Everything is not taken for granted. The way things are now, or were in the past, or may be in the future, is bound to change. Culture and era determine things that we are not aware of unless we take the long view. These things are contingent in a way that a writer of contemporary fiction may not realize. An SF writer must realize that. One of the failures of much aspiring SF is that it is set two hundred years in the future, yet the characters are exactly as they are today, with the same cultural expectations and behaviors. And on the flip side, the characters have no motivation for acting the way they do, as if to say that, because the story’s set on a planet circling Alpha Centauri, the people can do anything for any reason. Total cardboard. I blame media SF for this.
If I see anything as uniting my enterprise as a teacher of literature and of fiction writing, it is that SF and fantasy are legitimate forms of art. They may have some peculiar rules, but they are worthy of serious study and respect, and can bear serious study and earn that respect.
CP: I’m glad to hear you say that, and glad you’re working to make it happen. I’ve enjoyed talking with you, and thanks for your time!
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Catherine Pellegrino is an Articles Editor for Strange Horizons. Catherine’s previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our archives.
The Grand Illusion
Einstein’s paradoxical proposal: gravity is but a change in perspective
By Brian Tung
9/10/01
Frontiers are an invention. Nature doesn’t give a hoot.
—Lieutenant Rosenthal, The Grand Illusion (1937)
As part of the day-to-day activities in my line of work, I occasionally attend seminars on various aspects of computer science. Some of the seminars are called “distinguished lectures”; these are given by people at the forefront of their field, who have been working in that area for some time, so I make extra sure to attend those.
The advance notice for one of these distinguished lectures indicated that it was about a “computational model of sketching.” Now, we all know what sketching is—it’s drawing this and that with stick figures and rough circles, and so on. There are lots of computer programs out there to do this stuff. And the obvious thing that comes to mind first when one hears about a “computational model of sketching” is a set of tools to turn rough circles into perfect circles, crooked lines into straight lines, cross-hatched areas into smooth shading, and so forth.
Totally boring. My first inclination was not to go. However, my second inclination was to reason as follows: it’s a distinguished lecture; therefore, it must be interesting. If it’s truly interesting, it can’t be about what I think it’s about; therefore, I must be wrong about what it’s about. Ergo, I have to go and find out what it’s really about. So I went, and I wasn’t disappointed; it was about the many ways that people encode a lot of information on the back of an envelope during quick technical discussions, using not only drawings but also speech, gestures, and pictorial conventions (arrows, for example), and how to make use of those to preserve the content. We all know how something can seem so obvious when you’re talking about it, and then when you wake up the next morning you can’t make heads or tails of it—it’s completely lost! So it was interesting to hear about how other people try to prevent that from happening.
But what’s also interesting is that I somehow took as more compelling the idea that the lecture was distinguished, and therefore interesting, rather than that it was about sketching, and therefore boring. It reminds me of how science works; normally, scientific progress is made in a bottom-up fashion: first you gather the data, then you analyze the data for patterns, and then, based on the patterns, you derive some sort of rule for the phenomenon you’re studying. But every now and then—in a flash of insight—an overriding principle can be followed top-down to reach some startling conclusions.
Einstein worked top-down, for example, and he came up with some earth-shaking stuff. As I mentioned in my last essay, special relativity starts out with the overriding principle that the speed of light is a fundamental constant, no matter how you measure it, and ends up by predicting some pretty strange effects on space and time. For example, it asserts that just because you and I are moving by each other on passenger trains, I’ll see your clock moving slow, and you’ll see my clock moving slow.
Now, isn’t that some sort of contradiction in terms? If you see my clock going slow compared to yours, and I already see yours slow compared to mine, shouldn’t my own clock then run doubly slow compared to itself? What on earth is going on here?
The escape hatch from this paradox, which is sometimes called the twin paradox, is that you can only compare clocks when they are in the same place, or at rest with respect to one another. While we’re relatively moving, we can’t agree on what’s simultaneous. But in order to compare the speeds of our clocks, we need to agree on the two times we’ll check them; if we can’t agree on that, we can’t agree on their speeds! And in order to do that, we have to either meet in the same place, or at least head in the same direction at the same speed.
But—and here’s the rub—to do that, at least one of us is going to have to change speeds, or change direction, or both. And that’s an acceleration. To put it graphically, consider the path of two cars.
If two cars, A and B, start moving apart, then there’s no way that they can continue moving in their respective directions and eventually meet up, or head in the same direction. One of the cars has to accelerate. If I’m the one in car A, who continues in the same speed in the same direction, and you’re the one in car B who has to turn around and catch up with me, then I’m moving inertially and you’re not, and it’ll be my clock that runs normally, and your clock that runs slow.
The reason why this isn’t just common sense is that ordinary trains and cars don’t move fast enough for the special relativity effects to become noticeable. Even at typical airplane speeds, it takes atomic clocks to get the precision necessary to notice the difference. But the differences that are noticeable are always in full accordance with Einstein’s predictions. In fact, within the precision allowed by today’s experiments, none of the predictions made by Einstein’s special theory of relativity has ever been invalidated. Not a single one! It is an outstandingly successful theory, and for that reason and others, it was accepted fairly quickly after Einstein published it.