User:Ladysydb/HUMN 4472 Journal
August 25, 2019: Science Fiction[edit]
It is challenging for me to define science fiction off the top of my head. I can name many science fiction movies, shows and books and the diversity of ideas and tropes between them is astounding, especially when compared to other genres like dramas and mysteries. It is fantastical, yet grounded in reality in a way that fantasy is not.
So I suppose I would define science fiction as a genre that utilizes scientific technology, concepts, and innovations as plot devices to answer the question "what if" and any potential followup questions. When I look at my favorite sci-fi books, movies, etc., I think they ask and answer questions that society asks as we continue to evolve. For example:
Alien(1979 film) & Mars Attacks! : what if aliens were real? Would they be good or evil? How would people defend themselves if they were evil?
Terminator(1984 film): what if computers got so advanced that they took over the world?
Brave New World: what if humans lived in a society ruled by a totalitarian government? How did it get to that point? How do they keep control over society?
Black Mirror: what if humans could record and save every experience in their mind and playback it at their leisure? What if people lived in a society based on a digital social rating system?
Children of Men: what if humans were suddenly rendered infertile?
August 25, 2019: Science Fiction 2[edit]
I appreciated Le Guin's acknowledgement that defining science fiction has been challenging for literary experts, critics and readers since its conception and even asks if it's non-definability is an essential quality of it.
I learned a lot from this reading because it is determined not to define science fiction as a genre because genres and the tropes within them are used for marketability and commercialism for entertainment purposes, not for the academia of literature. I, myself, am guilty of falling for these ploys, if most of my examples in post 1 are any indication. Instead, Le Guin discusses its characteristics and compares its characteristics to the other genres.
In post 1, I described science fiction as fantastical, but grounded. Le Guin goes further into depth with this as she compares science fiction to both realism and fantasy, deeming realism and science fiction to be perhaps literary siblings or cousins and fantasy to be the grandmother of both and fiction, in general. One critic, S. R. Delaney describes science fiction as "subjunctive reality": it imagines what has not happened. Realistic fiction imagines what could have happened and fantastic fiction as what could not have happened. Science fiction can be even further broken down into tales of the cautionary, the extrapolative and the parallel alternate world of which Le Guin finds an overlap with realism. The consensus is that any sentence from realistic fiction can occur in science fiction but the reverse is not true.
The comparison of fantasy was actually straightforward and I already figured as much. If it has magic, invokes the supernatural or otherwise inexplicably violates natural law as current society accepts, it is fantasy. However, I really enjoyed that Le Guin's further musing on the subject, deeming it universal and I agree. One of my favorite series in the world is Harry Potter. I started reading it in 2nd grade. I was a 7-8 year old black girl who grew up on Air Force base in Warner Robins, GA and the furthest I'd ever traveled from home at that point was to Chicago, Illinois. What I did know about castles, cauldrons, mandrake roots, and English culture? Absolutely nothing. But the words teleported me to that world that I knew nothing about and that's how I fell in love with reading and writing. Science fiction is fantastical in the sense that it's making up something we know can't exist as in our realm of scientific advancement but it gives us space to question our reality as it exists.
Chris McKitterick[1] describes science fiction as multi-interdisciplinary. Many of the tropes and technology we see in science fiction are plot devices, meant to help move the story forward or develop the setting. McKitterick states that in order to be able to meaningfully analyze science fiction, it's important to not only be able grasp the scientific background, but also understand the historical, societal and economical implications of these devices as well. Black Mirror and Brave New World immediately came to mind when I read this, as I've previously had to critically analyze both with these considerations in mind.