Science and Literature

A cultural history of science fiction

Instructor: Alexis Rider

Course Description Societies have long attempted to imagine the future. Stars communicated portends, plagues relayed messages, births or deaths foretold events. But over the past 200-odd years, the shape of things to come has been explicitly bound to that amorphous beast, ‘Science.’ What humans can use the sciences to do—whether dystopian or utopian—has been the central mythology of modernity, told vividly through what we call ‘science fiction.’ But where does science stop, and fiction begin? This interdisciplinary course argues that both science and science fiction ask—and attempt to answer—the same fundamental questions. What is ‘nature’? What is ‘culture’? How do we define the ‘human’? What counts as life and death? What is it that makes a world, and where are we in it? By exploring works that draw on biology, ecology, genetics, physics, and robotics and through tales of cellular modification, unruly plants, non-capitalist or non-patriarchal societies, time-space breaches, and robot-poets, we explore how, as Thomas Huxley argued in 1860, “Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing.” Course Work, Assignments, Grade Distribution We will meet for five weeks, from May 28 – July 2, on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 1.05-5.05 p.m. Class will be a mix of lectures, class discussion, quiet reading time, and films. Each week, we will engage explicitly with one broad analytical lens that is essential to effective critical thinking in the humanities. These are: race, gender, class, the non-human, and the environment. Each lens is a complex, problematic, and power-laden category that has been deployed by science and taken up and challenged in science fiction. This weekly emphasis does not mean that other facets are not present or relevant to the texts; in fact, reading across themes and topics is strongly encouraged. The thematic ‘weeks’ are structured to include a weekend (i.e. weeks run Thursday-Tuesday), giving you more time to read, digest, and reflect on the material. Attendance (which includes engagement with the readings and in discussion) is worth 20% of your final grade. A short mid-term assignment, based on a short story by James Tiptree Jr. of your choice, is worth 30%. A final project, broken down into conception (5%), outline (10%), and completed product (35%) makes up the rest of your grade. This project, which should engage with course materials in order to reflect upon multiple themes from throughout the semester, is an opportunity for you to be creative. It can take any form: a regular paper (10-15 pages), an art work, a graphic novel, a short film, a video game, a play, a podcast (this is by no means an exhaustive list—you can propose anything else during the conception phase of the assignment). Creative projects must be accompanied with a concept paper (3-5 pages) that clarifies the viewpoint behind it and the broader engagement with course materials. University Policies and Regulations: I respect and uphold University policies and regulations pertaining to the observation of religious holidays, assistance available to differently abled, visually and/or hearing-impaired students, plagiarism, sexual harassment, and racial or ethnic discrimination. Please make yourselves familiar with the pertinent regulations and bring any questions or concerns to my attention. I would like to emphasize in particular the University of Pennsylvania’s Code of Academic Integrity

Course Outline Please note this outline is tentative and incomplete: readings and films will be added/changed.

Tuesday, May 28: Introduction This session will cover general introductions, discussion of the syllabus and class expectations, and an analysis of readings that 1) unpack what science fiction is 2) explore the relationship between science and literature.

◦ Gillian Beer, ‘Translation or Transformation? The Relation of Literature and Science’ in Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 173-196

◦ CP Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (London: Cambridge University Press, 1959), excerpts.

Week One: Class (Thursday, May 30 + Tuesday, June 4) Week one will draw on the role of science in producing and justifying particular social structures, how labor is reified through class and science. We will ask: who is able to make claims as a scientist? And what sort of society—stratified or no—does science produce and science fiction help us imagine?

◦ Ursula le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (New York: Harper & Row, 1974) ◦ Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, tr. Clarence Brown (New York: Penguin Press, 1993; orig. 1921). ◦ Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and The Experimental Life

(Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985) excerpts. ◦ Never Let Me Go, Dir. Mark Romanek [film]

Week Two: Gender (Thursday, June 6 + Tuesday, June 11) This week, we consider how science constructs and gender, and how gender roles and difference are coded and debated as being ‘natural’ or ‘social.’ We also look more broadly at how science, and science fiction, are spaces that have long-been dominated by white men.

◦ James Tiptree Jr., Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1990) selected short stories.

◦ Emily Martin, ‘The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles’ Signs 16, no. 3 (1991): 485–501.

◦ Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–599.

*Project conception due, June 11*

Week Three: Race (Thursday, June 13 + Tuesday, June 18) This week will center on the scientific construction of race, the way SF writers challenge and complicate the biological assumptions of racialization, and the power inherent to classification.

◦ Octavia E. Butler, Dawn (Book One of Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy) (New York: Warner, 1987) ◦ Ruha Benjamin, ‘Racial Fictions, Biological Facts: Expanding the Sociological Imagination through

Speculative Methods,’ Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2 (2), 2016: 1-28. ◦ Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York:

Routledge, 1989), introduction. ◦ NK Jemisin, ‘Why I Think RaceFail Was The Bestest Thing Evar for SFF’ Blog post Jan. 18, 2010.

* Assignment one, analysis of Tiptree story, due June 18*

Week Four: Non-Human (Thursday, June 20 + Tuesday, June 25)

In week four we consider the blurring of boundaries beyond the human and think through what it means for science to rely on an anthropocentric world-view. What happens when life, value, and power is distributed beyond the human?

◦ Bot or Not? ◦ A. M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59 (Oct 1950), pp. 433-460. ◦ Stanisław Lem, The Cyberiad – Fables for the Cybernetic Age. Michael Kandel, trans. (London: Secker and

Warburg, 1975) selected stories. ◦ Isaac Asimov, ‘Runaround,’ in I, Robot (New York: Gnome Press, 1950) ◦ Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016)

excerpts. ◦ Blade Runner, Ridley Scott, 1982 [film]

*Project Outline due June 25: in-class writing time will be included*

Week Five: The Environment (Thursday, June 27 + Tuesday, July 2) In our final week, while working on our final projects, we turn to books that can roughly be cast as ‘Cli Fi’ (climate fiction), but that also engage heavily with the themes of the previous weeks. We ask, what does ‘nature’ look like in the distant, and not-so-distant, future? Can science be seen as a savior for environmental problems? What lessons have we learnt about who makes science, and how claims of scientific certainty are powerful?

◦ NK Jemisin, The Fifth Season (New York: Orbit, 2015) ◦ Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation (or we may watch the film adaptation if we’re all reading-overwhelmed) ◦ Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (First Mariner Books, 2002; orig. 1962) ◦ Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (New York: Wiley, 2017), excerpts

*Final Project Due July 2*