Strange Horizons, Sep ’01
Strange Horizons, Inc.
CONTENTS:
Article: Interview: John Kessel, by Catherine Pellegrino
Article: The Grand Illusion, by Brian Tung
Article: Reason, Sexuality, and the Self in Libertarian Science Fiction Novels, by Greg Beatty
Article: How the Stirrup Changed Our World, by Dan Derby
Fiction: On the Wall, by Jo Walton, illustration by Colleen Doran
Fiction: Somewhere Down the River (part 1 of 2), by Simon Bewick
Fiction: Somewhere Down the River (part 2 of 2), by Simon Bewick
Fiction: Other Cities #1 of 12: Bellur, by Benjamin Rosenbaum
Fiction: When She Came Walking, by Tim Jones
Music: Interview: Urban Tapestry, by Peggi Warner-Lalonde
Poetry: Hibernal Cryodreams of Conquest, by Steve Sneyd and Gene van Troyer
Poetry: Reunion, by Lucy A. E. Ward
Poetry: Deconstructing Night, by Ann K. Schwader
Poetry: Dreaming Black Holes, by Sandra J. Lindow
Review: Speculative Fiction on the Web, by Janean Nusz and R Michael Harman
Review: Gwyneth Jones’s Deconstructing the Starships: Science, Fiction and Reality, reviewed by Wendy Pearson
Review: Roberta Gellis’s Thrice Bound, reviewed by Heidi Elizabeth Smith
Review: Lyda Morehouse’s Archangel Protocol, reviewed by S. N. Arly
Editorial: I’m a Stranger Here Myself, by Brian Peters
Interview: John Kessel
By Catherine Pellegrino
9/3/01
In addition to being very tall, John Kessel is a prolific writer of speculative fiction. His books include Good News From Outer Space, Corrupting Dr. Nice, Meeting In Infinity, and The Pure Product. He also helps to run the Sycamore Hill Writers’ Conference.
When he’s not busy doing all that, though, he’s a professor of American literature and creative writing at North Carolina State University, where he regularly teaches courses on both fantasy and science fiction literature. It was this aspect of his work that particularly intrigued me, and around which I focused the questions in this interview.
Catherine Pellegrino: What authors and books do you teach in a course on speculative fiction? What does the reading list for a typical syllabus look like? How do you organize a course—do you do a chronological survey; do you group the readings thematically, or do you use some other organization?
John Kessel: Since I teach separate courses on science fiction and fantasy, I’ll speak about each separately. My SF course is generally organized as a historical survey from the beginnings of the genre to the present. I maintain that true science fiction is a child of popular fiction and the Industrial Revolution, and could not get started before the late 1700’s. Following Brian Aldiss, then, I often start with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
CP: Who is Brian Aldiss, and why is he important?
JK: Aldiss was the first to publicize the idea of Frankenstein as the first science fiction novel. He wrote a book in the early ‘70s called Billion Year Spree (updated in the ‘80s to Trillion Year Spree) that traces the history of science fiction literature.
I try to change at least a couple of books on my book list every semester to resist getting stale, but a typical book list will have eight to ten books (mostly novels, some short story collections or anthologies). After Shelley, I might include Poe or Verne or Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I will always include something by H.G. Wells, and must have taught a dozen of his novels in the time I’ve been teaching this course. I will often include Edgar Rice Burroughs. I will usually include an SF novel from outside the pulp tradition that gets started with Hugo Gernsback in the 1920s, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Yevgeny Zamiatin, maybe Orwell’s 1984 later on, perhaps Kurt Vonnegut. From the Golden Age SF I’ll include something by Heinlein, Asimov, or Clarke or an anthology of stories. From there it’s on to Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon, Cordwainer Smith, C.M. Kornbluth, Philip K. Dick, Damon Knight. In the New Wave era I’ll teach Delany, Le Guin, Wolfe, Disch, or Silverberg. In the eighties and nineties I’ll have something by Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Lew Shiner, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lucius Shepard, James Patrick Kelly, Karen Fowler, Maureen McHugh. And always somewhere in the list I’ll include an anthology like The Science Fiction Hall of Fame or Le Guin & Attebery’s Norton Book of SF or Dozois’ Modern Classics of SF.
The fantasy course I organize more along historical/thematic terms. As I teach it today, the first half of the course tries to give a historical vision of the origins of Tolkienesque high fantasy and heroic fantasy. I’ll often start with Beowulf (in translation), use a collection of folk and fairy tales, move on to The Hobbit or sometimes The Lord of the Rings, then look at more contemporary work like Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories, or Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun or Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea books. That gets us through the first half of the course.
In the second half, we look at various other types of fiction that I think fall within the purview of fantasy. Horror, the Ghost Story, Nonsense, Surrealism, Metafiction, Magic Realism, Contemporary fantasy. We’ll read Carroll’s Alice books, The Wizard of Oz, a collection of Borges stories, a Kafka collection, Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, some contemporary fantasists like Butler’s Kindred or Murphy’s The Falling Woman or Goldstein’s Tourists. Shirley Jackson or Stephen King, Dracula, Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife. I often end with Geoff Ryman’s Was.
CP: How has your reading list changed over the years that you’ve been teaching courses on speculative fiction?
JK: In SF, I spend less time on the pre-1950 era than I used to. I don’t generally spend much time in the 1800s; nowadays I skip Verne, for instance. I spend much more time on the last thirty years. In fantasy, I tend to stretch the boundaries of genre more than I used to. The second half of my course doesn’t look like the normal fantasy course, I think.
CP: What themes in speculative fiction do you stress in your courses? What do you want your students to get out of a class?
JK: In SF, from class one I stress the two cultures debate. I don’t have to impress it on the works, it’s there from the beginning. We look at SF both as a celebration of the promise of science and technology, and a Cassandra warning of the threat of science and technology. We see how the issues get more complicated as we approach the present.
CP: What exactly was the two cultures debate?
JK: The literary critic C. P. Snow wrote an essay in the 1950s entitled “The Two Cultures,” in which he argued that the humanities and the sciences had grown apart into two separate cultures. He essentially argued that science was the “better” or more valuable of the two, because it was advancing the quality of life for humanity. Another literary critic, F. R. Leavis, took umbrage at Snow’s position and argued the humanists’ side, citing evidence such as the atomic bomb to show that science had actually made the quality of life worse. The debate was active in literary circles from about 1958 to about 1968.
In my science fiction course, I also tell the story of how SF was part of mainstream literature before the 20th century, how it later got identified as a genre with Burroughs and the pulp magazines, and how it has struggled ever since to get taken seriously as “literature.” We talk about the science fiction canon, and the literary canon (where SF is essentially invisible, as SF).
We also look at SF as a commentary on and reaction to the time in which it was written. One of my favorite cliches is that a science fiction story often tells you as much about the year it was written as it does about the year in which it is set. This gets us to some extent into cultural criticism, though I am by no means trained in cultural critique. My training as a Ph.D. student was strictly in the New Criticism.
CP: For the benefit of our readers who don’t sling literary terms on a daily basis, can you explain more about what the New Criticism is?
JK: Actually, it’s now pretty much the Old Criticism now. It’s an approach to literary study that began in the 1930s and went hand-in-hand with modernism, dominating the field of English studies through the 1960s and ‘70s. The New Criticism says that you should only study the text, and that considerations like the author’s biography and the cultural circumstances surrounding the writing of the work are irrelevant. More recent schools of criticism are largely in response to the New Criticism: deconstructionism was a direct attack on it, and postmodernism thinks of itself as a parody of the New Criticism.
In my fantasy course, we start with the origins of high fantasy in the hero tale and the fairy tale. We talk about the uses of the fantastic in fiction. The necessity of escape and the dangers of escape, the differentiation between what Tolkien called “the flight of the deserter” and the “escape of the prisoner.” What impulse is it in the human character that brings us (or at least some of us) to fantasy? There are no simple answers to these questions, so they are fun to ask. I hope my students will come up with some answers of their own by the end of the semester.