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Ray guns and robots? Lasers and light sabers? If that's your idea of science fiction, think again. Sci fi is coming of age.
(And by the way, please don't call it sci fi.)
ACCORDING TO GRACE Dillon, assistant professor, "it's 'SF.'" She should know.
Although she has a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature, Dillon's passion is science fiction. She is not alone.
From academic conferences to libraries stocked with reasoned writings—including two recent scholarly books by PSU profs—science fiction is finding a home on literature's bookshelf.
THERE'S A GREAT DEAL of excitement about SF on the West Coast, on campuses, and at PSU, says Dillon. Portland State recognized that interest by creating Dillon's position, one of the few faculty positions in the U.S. dedicated to teaching science fiction (rather than teaching only a class or two).
But aren't we talking action-packed sagas of bug-eyed aliens? Not exactly.
At the simplest SF level, there's science, of course—either scientific gadgetry or scientific theory, says Dillon. Scientific theory might be of the present—say, nanotechnology—or of the past, such as now discredited theories about race. But along with the science, these days there's also an investigation of culture, gender, religion, or all of the above.
It's that deepening of themes that has helped tip SF into the literary camp.
"It's clear," says Carl Abbott, professor of urban studies and planning, "that over the decades many layers of sophistication have been added to science fiction."
A long-time historical writer, Abbott has published numerous books on Western cities and how they developed. But his recreational reading has always included massive quantities of science fiction. A few years ago, he realized that the themes he was writing about in his historical work were themes he was reading about in SF.
Abbott's book Frontiers Past and Future: Science Fiction and the American West, published earlier this year, investigates how these Western themes are refracted in stories set in an SF future--like human pioneers conquering new planets who must survive through adversity, something Abbott calls the "Little House on the Big Planet."
Such adventure stories are a staple of all fiction, including SF. (Star Wars, anyone?) "That's not gone away," says Abbott. "But there are more writers with literary skills. Writers interested in exploring sophisticated issues of cultural change. Le Guin is key in this area."
PORTLAND WRITER URSULA K. Le Guin is a supernova on any bookshelf. Her list of writing awards is voluminous. And none other than uber-critic Harold Bloom, says Dillon, called Le Guin one of the finest writers—not SF writers—but writers of the 21st century.
Le Guin first came to prominence as a member of SF's "New Wave," writers who merged science fiction with the social upheavals and environmental concerns of the late 1960s and early 1970s. These mostly West Coast writers investigated the possibilities of environmental calamity, social change (for good and not) and what worlds that might create.
The West Coast also produced the other major thread in current SF—cyberpunk.
From cyber, meaning information, and punk, to indicate social resistance, cyberpunk had its origins in Vancouver, B.C., writer William Gibson's seminal 1980s novel, Neuromancer. In that book, Gibson created a "mythology of the computer," says Dillon. He also coined the term "cyberspace" for a virtual world inside computers, a place where thoughts take form.
At the time, says Dillon, few if any had considered that humans might have a life inside a computer—in cyberspace. Others quickly took up the idea and began writing about dystopian worlds of a hypothetical future. As MySpace and online game playing increasingly fill our spare time, Gibson's ideas seem less far-fetched every day.
DILLON HAS COLLECTED writings from Le Guin, Gibson, and other heavy hitters in Hive of Dreams: Contemporary Science Fiction from the Pacific Northwest to explore the essence of cyberlit and of the New Wave's environmentally focused science fiction, which she calls "ecolit."
People are particularly interested in science fiction now, Dillon thinks, because they're interested in themes that SF writers are tackling—like the environment and neoglobism (First World nations forcing their ideas onto Third World nations).
Sounds heavy. But consider how SF writers investigate those themes—by creating fantastic worlds where opposing ideas can be given life and examined—perhaps aliens who assume that their race is the universal best and that they are at liberty to impose their beliefs on puny earthlings, or the future of an Earth where global warming is in full swing.
Whatever the milieu, SF gives readers a chance to see the consequences of today's actions and beliefs evolved into a hypothetical—and therefore risk-free—future. Science fiction can investigate in "safe" ways by putting today's concerns on a distant planet or in a future time and watching what happens.
"You get to imaginatively think through the isolation of technology," through issues of "culture, sex, race, and gender," says Dillon. "That's the real draw of SF."
"I like science fiction because it allows me to play with metaphor," says Molly Gloss '66, who writes both fiction set in the real world and science fiction. "My own science fiction," says Gloss, "is just exploring the same themes I explore in my realistic fiction."
Which is pretty much Webster's definition of literature: "writings having excellence of form or expression and expressing ideas of permanent or universal interest."
Melissa Steineger, a Portland freelance writer, wrote the article "Safe Haven" in the spring 2006 PSU Magazine.
Inventing New Worlds
Just where did science fiction begin? Some point to Homer's reference to mechanistic servants—robots, perhaps? But many people consider Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, published in 1818, with its scientific experiment gone awry, to be the seminal text.
Jules Verne first succeeded commercially with the widely popular Journey to the Center of the Earth in 1864 and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in 1870. His novels paved the way for H.G. Wells in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Wells virtually invented the modern categories of science fiction with The Time Machine (time travel), The First Men in the Moon (interplanetary travel) and The War of the Worlds (alien invasion).
The so-called Golden Age of science fiction writing coincides with John W. Campbell's editorship of Astounding magazine. Campbell curried a stable of writers synonymous with the SF pantheon—Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein foremost among them.
In the 1960s and 1970s, science fiction merged with cultural upheaval of the time and emerged as the "New Wave," exploring contemporary themes in a science fiction milieu. In the 1980s, William Gibson lit up the SF sky with Neuromancer—the novel that gave the world the word "cyberspace."