Engaging a World Through Speculative Fiction

In the introduction to Octavia’s Brood, an anthology of speculative fiction short stories inspired by legendary SF writer Octavia Butler, artist and activist Walidah Imarisha writes, “Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction.” This declaration might surprise those who tend to associate speculative fiction and science fiction with pulpy pleasure and escapism. In this blog post, I’ll offer a similar understanding of science fiction, or “SF”: not only as a genre that grapples with serious social, political, and technological issues, but also as a genre to engage critical thinking—particularly in the undergraduate classroom.

Science Fiction and Critical Thinking

When scholars talk about the genre, they focus on its ability to inspire critical reflection on society. Science fiction “defamiliarizes” the familiar world. By imagining possible futures and alternative realities, SF helps the reader to look with clear eyes on the present. It also allows for utopian possibility. In SF you can imagine the future however you want.

All of this is to say that to read and enjoy science fiction requires the very critical thinking skills we seek to help our students develop. Science fiction is a literary laboratory for political theory, moral reasoning, and scientific ethics. When analyzing SF, you are confronting social assumptions (your own, as well as those of the author); you are considering and evaluating multiple possible futures; you are examining what you view as comfortingly “natural” and what you view as upsettingly “unnatural.” All of these tasks help to hone critical thinking skills.

Take, for instance, the recently departed Ursula K. Le Guin’s famous speculative short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” The story describes a vibrant, thriving city founded on a terrible secret: that the city’s happiness is mysteriously linked to the cruel imprisonment and mistreatment of a lonely child. Every citizen is told this fact when they come of age; most stay, but, as the title indicates, some, unable to accept the cost of their happiness, find themselves compelled to leave. In the classroom, the story inevitably provokes major debates between students who would walk away and those who would stay. As each group defends its position, students are forced to engage in complex descriptions of moral calculations and uncomfortable comparisons between Le Guin’s world and their own. After all, if it’s unambiguously unacceptable to let your happiness rest on somebody else’s pain, what does that mean for our daily lives?

Teaching SF Across the Disciplines

While SF is most frequently taught in literature departments, the genre’s sweeping thematic range means that it can be brought into all kinds of classrooms. In what follows, I’ll offer a few examples, but these are by no means exhaustive: for any discipline, there is an SF story that doesn’t just illustrate major issues, but actually invites students to engage those issues by actively debating them.

Let’s start with medicine—a field particularly relevant to WSSU, given its large and impressive undergraduate nursing programs. There are innumerable SF stories that could help students delve into health inequities,  experiences of disease and disability, and the ethics of care. For instance, Octavia Butler’s short story “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” could be used in a nursing curriculum to help students come to terms with the socially isolating experience of chronic illness. The story is narrated by a character who is a carrier of a genetic disease that eventually leads to compulsive, fatal self-mutilation. Nursing students could be asked to analyze how the protagonist’s experience of disease affects her relationships to peers and to medical professionals, to compare the isolating, institutionalized treatment in the story to different kinds of health systems, and to come up with patient care practices that might compare favorably to those in Butler’s story.

SF could also be brought easily into a women’s and gender studies classroom. There is a rich tradition of feminist utopias and dystopias, from English writer Margaret Cavendish’s 1666 utopia The Blazing World through the present. The current Hulu television series The Handmaid’s Tale, an adaptation of Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood’s acclaimed 1985 novel of the same name, is an excellent teaching tool for helping students to think about the politics of reproduction. The Handmaid’s Tale is set in a dystopian future in which calamitously dropping fertility rates prompt a fundamentalist revolution. Under the new regime, young, fertile women are forced into non-consensual relationships in which they bear children on behalf of powerful male “Commanders” and their infertile wives. Critical responses to The Handmaid’s Tale locate the story not only in the American present (where it is often seen as a frightening warning of possible patriarchal futures), but also, crucially, in histories of sexual violence against enslaved women and of the forced sterilization of women deemed unfit for reproduction by the state. Women’s and gender studies students could be asked to think critically about the relationship between sexual and reproductive autonomy, the social mechanisms that produce compulsory heterosexuality, and the complicity of privileged women in the oppression of less powerful women.

SF and Innovative Pedagogy

In Black Speculative Literature of the 20th and 21st Centuries, students hone critical reading, thinking, and writing skills not only by analyzing SF, but by researching and creating their own original works of SF. Using SF as a writing assignment asks our students to move from passively receiving culture to actively creating it. I ask them a series of questions: What kinds of stories do you feel need to be told by and about Black people? What kinds of futures do you wish for, and what kinds of futures do you fear? What are the social conditions that appear natural to us now, but could easily be otherwise? Then I invite them: make that story come alive on the page. Students have responded with tales of love and war between alien species, with stories that shift the location of power across lines of race, class, and gender, with narratives that celebrate the histories and possibilities of Black culture. By reading SF, they learn to question; by writing SF, they learn to carry those questions outward into the world. SF opens up new avenues for critical thinking in undergraduate courses–not just in literature classes, but across the disciplines.