Once upon a time, say between the start of the Great Depression and the outbreak of World War Il, science fiction was not something one studied in a university.
Rather, it was best taken home in a plain brown bag and read under the covers with one’s trusty flashlight.
Now, 25 years after the first course on science fiction was included within the official curriculum of an accredited institution, SF's arrival in the classroom is still greeted with ambivalence, not only by diehard devotees of literature, but by SF buffs as well.
Some aficionados have sensed that too much interest on the part of academe may result in a loss of the subversive quality that once made the activity of reading SF thrilling and even somewhat naughty.
The people who teach in SF studies at USC feel a certain sympathy for these concerns. For the most part, it was the raw energy and youthful exuberance of the work that first attracted them to it. For them, the wonder has been that they've managed to hold onto their enthusiasm through the course of their more traditional literary studies.
They've accomplished this by keeping in mind an old bromide coined by the late science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon.
Sturgeon’s law stipulated that “90 percent of science fiction is garbage. Of course,” he added, “90 percent of everything is garbage.”
The joy, of course, is in discovering the gems.
USC assistant professor of Slavic languages Thomas Siefrid got his first sense of the powerful appeal of Soviet science fiction at the peasant collective farm market in Leningrad.
Siefrid, a frequent visitor to the Soviet Union who, with his wife, was there for a stay with her family, noticed that a crowd had gathered around a peasant woman, drawn to her, perhaps, by a furtive look in her eyes and a way she had of clutching her thick coat that did the work of a neon sign in announcing that she had something unusual to sell.
Finding himself as intrigued by the woman's behavior as were the bargainconscious shoppers flocking to her, the young Russia-watcher drew in closer for a look. Perhaps, as in the movies, she would open her coat and reveal lines of pockets bulging with wristwatches and lewd postcards. Or, far more likely in the Soviet Union, a pair of Levis and the latest Springsteen. Siefrid was surprised to learn that she was carrying something that generated nearly as much avid interest as any of those coveted Western wares. It was a battered, tattered anthology, dating back to 1965, of Russian-language science fiction stories.
Siefrid’s second encounter with the literary culture of Soviet science fiction took place last year, at USC. The young Chicago native, who had planned to become a biologist before he was exposed to Russian literature, was teaching a course on Soviet society and culture when he was asked by his department if he would prepare a course on Russian SF.
He had never before cast more than a cursory glance at this particular genre of Russian literature. But he was familiar with 19th-century Russian utopian thought, and this did suggest a certain continuity. Moreover, it occurred to Siefrid that monitoring the genre might enable him to look at Soviet society and culture through a portal seldom used by other Russiawatchers.
Taught in English and based on stories and novels available in translation, the course is designed to offer fresh insight into Russian socio-political trends. Science fiction, in this instance, must be considered less as a medium for popular entertainment than as a barometer to gauge the country’s political climate at any given time.
This becomes possible because Russian science fiction—unlike its American counterpart, which has traditionally been buffeted by marketing and, to a lesser extent, literary considerations—has either thrived or shriveled in accordance with the prevailing political winds.
Soviet science fiction writers, explains Siefrid, walk a tightrope: “Russian science fiction grew directly out of 19th-century utopian thought. Unfortunately, it tends to run up against the Soviet state’s own version of utopia. And the USSR regards counter or alternate utopias with considerable mistrust.”
But although Soviet science fiction has faced periods of relative suppression, particularly during the Stalin era, it has never been entirely absent from Russian literature.
Nor, as happened in the West, did science fiction ever branch off from the mainstream of literature, there to earn the scorn of writers and critics as it strove to regain the craft of its early practitioners—people such as H.G. Wells, Jack London, Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain.
Indeed, the premier early writers of Russian science fiction—Aleksandr Alexandrovich Bogdanov, Aleksandr Beliaev or Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (commonly regarded as the first true visionary of realistic space travel) — were very much features in the Russian literary firmament.
Lately, however, Russian science fiction has not kept pace with the boom SF has experienced in the U.S. where, according to estimates, some 40 percent of all fiction falls into the SF, fantasy or horror category.
Siefrid believes that this might owe, in part, to a common perception of science fiction as a Western phenomenon. This makes it wildly popular when it becomes available, but with the exception of some youth and science magazines distributed mainly by subscription, there is not that much of it about.
Worse, there are indications that the Russian literary establishment tends to view science fiction as frivolous adventure fiction.
That may change, however, as the Gorbachev regime continues to press for glasnost, for openness and progress within Soviet society. One way to encourage a new interest in high technology, particularly among young people, may be to promote new forays into space opera.
One does not have to look too far afield in Russian literary history for parallel instances when social and political developments were reflected in, and exerted direct influence upon, the genre.
Indeed, Russian SF entered its first bloom after the 1905 Revolution, when the censor’s pen was wielded less heavily for a time.
But as the genre’s chroniclers have noted, Russian SF received its first major impetus from the pace of Russian industrialization, which engendered greater awareness among the already literate of science and technology, and brought the ability to read and to buy cheap books to people who had formerly been deprived of them.
The advent of World War I and the subsequent onset of the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War put the brakes on this activity, as the issues of previous utopian science fiction seemed to be working themselves out in reality. But as the Soviet Union gradually consolidated itself, the genre again began to flourish.
And during this interim between Lenin and Stalin, science fiction became a refuge for writers who, though not at all subversive in their writings, were at least somewhat skeptical of Marxism or merely interested in other philosophical or political issues. On the whole, their work was condoned because they established popular interest in the technological and social progress heralded by the new republic, and because most such writers were cautious enough to pay lip service to socialism in their stories.
“The one kind of SF the state tolerated,” explains Siefrid, “‘was optimistic science fiction that extolled the virtues of the coming technological wonders that, it was assumed, would be the outgrowth of present Soviet society. In Soviet SF, it was understood that future societies would either be identical to the present Soviet society or even more perfect.”
But there were some who viewed science fiction as a launching pad for searing political satire. A famous example of this was Yevgenii Zamiatin’s novel We (1922), which many say inspired George Orwell’s 1984. Zamiatin died in exile, his book largely unread in Russia. During the Stalin period, the genre went into hibernation, as the newly formed Union of Soviet Writers laid down new artistic and ideological strictures that were anathema to the far-reaching concerns of science fiction. The number of titles published then dropped to less than a handful, and a number of former SF writers concluded their careers in the gulag. But during the thaw that ensued in the '60s, Russian writers returned to the genre, which allowed the more adventurous among them to elude the censor when they were clever enough to couch their criticisms of Soviet society in the more obscure concerns of space opera. “Soviet censors,” notes Siefrid, “are usually slow to catch on. Not because they're stupid, but because they are conventional. Sometimes the most amazing things get through.”
Indeed, one writer, Ivan Efremov, had such a book (The Hour of the Bull) published in 1970, only to have it quietly discontinued upon his death two years later. And during the ensuing years of the 1970s, other science fiction writers, including the stars of the genre, Arkadii and Boris Strugatskii, have experienced difficulties in getting their works published.
It has been suggested that, because of this difficulty, there exists a whole body of subversive Russian science fiction in samizdat form—unpublished manuscripts that are passed around by members of Russian intellectual or social circles. Siefrid, however, finds this unlikely.
“When SF is used to satirize,” he says, “the writer generally couches his intent in allegory. But for the purpose of samizdat, why couch anything at all in allegory? The whole aim of samizdat is to enable writers to write about their concerns directly.”
When professor of English Paul Alkon teaches his introductory course on science fiction, he doesn’t spend a great deal of time trying to define what he means by the term.
Alkon doesn’t quite ascribe to the catch-all definition, particularly the rage among marketing enthusiasts, that maintains that “science fiction is what I say it is when I point to it.”” But he thinks that trying to sum it up ina sentence or two is just ‘‘a sterile literary game.”
Both Alkon and Robert Dilligan, an associate professor of English who alternates with him in offering the course, prefer to spend their semesters exploring “the rich spectrum of literature that falls under the heading of SF.”
Primarily, however, the two enthusiasts are prepared to consider two distinct categories of science fiction: Wellsian, which tends to explore the social consequences of technological change; and Vernesian, which delights in the sense of wonder generated by envisioning the uses to which technologies can be put.
In considering science fiction, Alkon and Dilligan are certain of this: Wellsian science fiction, which they prefer to read, is not intrinsically about the future, or about space travel, time travel, extraterrestrial encounters or any of the other elements normally assciated with SF.
“In science fiction,” says Dilligan, these things are metaphors. This is a way of distorting the surface so that the things beneath it can be seen."”
Take, for instance, H.G. Wells’ first and probably best science fiction novel, The Time Machine. The novel is not, says Dilligan, about a time machine, which is still a physical impossibility as far as anyone can determine. Rather, it is about “‘the change that 19th-century science produced in man’s perception of time.”
During the last century, as the geological record continued to become unraveled, it became apparent that the world was billions of years old and that life on it was evolving.
Wells’ novel of social change, which warned of impending catastrophe if class divisions were ultimately permitted to bring about an evolutionary branching of humanity into two species, was ostensibly a romance. But according to Dilligan, “‘it is about what we can say about human fate in a context that was suddenly new and expanded. It is about how we are to live our lives in the present given the burden of scientific knowledge.”
The popularity of science fiction might suggest that this is a burden many must still face. Certainly a glance at the students who attend Alkon and Dilligan’s course indicate that it is sensed as acutely by those in the sciences and engineering as those in the humanities.
Alkon’s first course, offered scant years ago, attracted only three students: an engineer, an English literature graduate student and a science fiction fan. While the enrollments have increased, the eclectic mix has stayed the same, both professors say. Science fiction, it would seem, offers at least one route toward bridging the “Two-Cultures”’ (the sciences and the humanities) which C.P. Snow argued, back during the '50s, had gone their own merry ways, each incapable of fathoming the concerns of the other.
Not, says Alkon, that science fiction presents an alternate road toward understanding either. “But it can help us understand the predicaments that technology gets us into.””
But although their classes have become so popular that they must turn students away, their inclusion in the curriculum has not met with universal approbation. An elitist view of literature, which in its day considered all American literature to be inherently below the salt when compared to the British product, still lingers in some corridors of academe in the form of a pronounced disdain for popular culture.
And indeed, Alkon, whose first love is the 18th-century novel, is quick to acknowledge that much science fiction is stultifyingly awful. “But that’s the normal situation for any literary genre,” he says. If one were to read the sum total of prose fiction written during the 18th century, he argues, one would be blinded by a migraine headache.
“It was mostly dreadful beyond all measure of dreadfulness.”
If SF hasn't had its Shakespeare or Tolstoy or Dostoevski yet, says Alkon, this is only because it hasn’t been around long enough.
“Shakespeare just happened to be a genius. If he hadn’t come around, the literary scene in his time would have been viewed quite differently. This kind of thing is in the lap of the gods.””
Dilligan, who is an expert in 18thcentury British literature and in the use of computers for conducting literary analyses, dismisses contentions that science fiction shouldn’t merit serious academic consideration. People who believe this, he says, especially those who haven't read any science fiction to speak of, clearly have a hidden political agenda in trashing it so unceremoniously.
“What the students sense,” he says, “is that this isn’t training—this is real education. It really gets them where they live: in a technological society for which they are preparing to become administrators.
“They have an intuition for the problems and dilemmas dealt with in the genre. And they respond to it seriously.”
ith only a semester left before his retirement, Paul J. Bohannan, dean of social sciences and communication in the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, is gearing up for a third career that, 20 years ago, would have caused academia to rear up on its haunches and hoot with derision. As things are, the erstwhile anthropologist’s stated intention of becoming a full-time writer of science fiction can still be counted upon to generate a flurry of raised eyebrows. After all, proponents of traditional literature have generally considered it de rigueur to regard science fiction as, in the words of one of the field’s premier historians, “an unwelcomed relative at the feast of literature.”
But even more to the point, embarking upon a career as a science fiction writer must seem a bizarre thing for a scholar of Bohannan’s stature to do.
Bohannan, who is 66, came to USC in September 1982. A former chairman of the anthropology department at Northwestern University, who has also taught at Princeton, Oxford and UC Santa Barbara, Bohannan is widely published, with a number of books and scholarly articles on such disparate issues as Africa, the law, welfare and sexual relations to his credit. His 1963 textbook Social Anthropology is considered a classic in the field.
And it is difficult for some of his colleagues to fathom why a past president of the American Anthropological Association and, moreover, a man whose writings have found homes in Psychology Today, Scientific American and the national press, would consider dedicating himself to what is in their eyes so dubious a genre as science fiction.
Nor will Bohannan’s apparent defection from serious scholarship bring any immediately discernable measure of delight to science fiction fans and writers. Many of them, alarmed at academia’s recent incursions into their once-hallowed territory, have called resoundingly to “keep SF in the gutter, where it belongs.”
But Bohannan, who has read a great deal of modern science fiction and admires precious little of it, clearly hopes to have a swing at reforming the genre. Or at least at providing a solid example of how the stuff he would like to read should be written.
Such ambitions, expressed by one who has yet to pay his dues in the field, are not likely to endear Bohannan either to those who work in SF or to those who disdain it. Having not yet written anything that he believes ought to be published, he risks not being taken seriously at all. But Bohannan is a crusty sort who characterizes himself as an “‘angry” man. And he says he doesn’t care a whit.
“I may not be successful at writing science fiction, but so what? I have never been in better physical, intellectual or emotional shape than I am now. I figure I have about 10 years left before I go ga-ga, and I intend to write about 10 or 15 good novellas and four or five first-rate novels until then.”
Oddly, Bohannan’s litany of complaints against science fiction is lengthy. Most of the novels and stories he has read are poorly written and focus on issues which do not interest him.
Moreover, too many SF writers, he says, lack any knowledge of the various principles upon which societies and cultures are built. And the fact that a majority of science fiction writers are trained in the natural sciences does not, in most instances, work to their advantage.
But whatever its flaws, SF can do one thing that other literary genres can’t, says Bohannan. It can get people to examine their hidden prejudices and assumptions without getting their backs up. This is probably why Jonathan Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels as a flight of fantasy instead of as a political tract.
Science fiction also offers the writer a unique laboratory for conducting what philosophers have characterized as thought experiments.’ And it is this ability that most intrigues Bohannan.
“What attracts me to science fiction,” he explains, “is that it allows you to set up a situation you can absolutely control. So long as you obey the laws of physics and society, you can do whatever you want with it. You can’t do this in traditional literature because that is about people like us in situations very much like our own. SF is about people like us in situations far removed from what we're familiar with.”
Indeed, Bohannan has some nasty surprises in store for the characters who populate his stories. He plans to pull the rug of reality out from under them in order to see how they react. Or rather, “to see what would happen in instances where the limitations placed on society by the cultural and biological characteristics of human beings are removed.”
To go about literarily pulling the wings off flies, however, Bohannan realizes that he must first learn how to write fiction. “The craft involved in this,”’ he says, “‘is far more demanding than anything that scholars ever learn.”
Bohannan has made a start. He has taken a number of writing courses here at USC, among them one on the art of drafting a decent script. And he has a number of works in progress in which to work out his craft and spew out the million or so “bad words” that are said to be inside every nascent writer.
“I have some points to make,” he concludes, ‘‘and I just want to shake people up and make them look at things. The whole purpose of fiction is to make it possible to look at the world and see it differently than ever before.”
Thomas Siefrid: “The USSR regards counter or alternate utopias with considerable mistrust.”
Robert Dilligan and Paul Alkon: “Students have an intuition for the problems and dilemmas dealt with in this genre. And they respond to it seriously.”
Paul Bohannan: “What attracts me to science fiction is that it allows you to set up a situation you can absolutely control. So long as you obey the laws of physics and society, you can do whatever you want.”
Island fantasies... If you were stranded on a desert island and could take only two works of science fiction, which would you choose? Trojan Family asked USC’s SF buffs. Here are their answers:
Paul Alkon: The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, by Ursula K. Le Guin (1974, Harper & Row). 1984, by George Orwell (1949, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich).
Robert Dilligan: The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin (1969, Walker). The Cat Who Walked Through Walls, by Robert Heinlein (1985, Putnam).
Thomas Siefrid: We, by Yevgeny Zamiatin (1924, Dutton). Aelita or The Decline of Mars, by Alexi Tolstoi (1985, Ardis).
Paul Bohannan: A couple of volumes of The Hugo Winners, edited by Isaac Asimov, first published by Doubleday in 1962.