“Some would argue that science fiction has to have science in it, that it makes an attempt to explain the unexplainable,” says Professor Danny Sexton, who teaches Introduction to Science Fiction.
“My definition is a bit broader, because I think good science fiction comments on the past, and the present, and anticipates the future.”
Sexton’s students grapple with their own definition of the genre, reading stories ranging from H.G. Wells’s “The Time Machine,” published 1895, to Philip K. Dick’s 1968 classic, “Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep?,” basis of the movie Blade Runner.
A contemporary lens
“Every alien seems the same,” asserts a student in Sexton’s class. “There’s no possible justification to envision a society, an entire species, as all just one culture.”
They’ve just read the 1949 Stanley Weinbaum short story, “Mad Moon,” and reviews are mixed. “There’s no diversity,” agrees a classmate. “It’s like how we look at immigrants, as being all the same.”
“Look at the word ‘alien’,” says Sexton. “We use that word to apply to humans, too. Think of the term ‘alienation’—where you feel separated and isolated from other people.”
Worlds collide
“In the three semesters I’ve taught science fiction at BMCC,” says Sexton, “students really latch on to it, to think about ‘what if?’ – ‘what if you threw this into the equation?’ For readers, it invites us to participate, and we become actively engaged in envisioning that world.”
In the story “Mad Moon,” future and past worlds meet in two characters, ‘Grant’ and ‘Lee’, and Sexton proposes there might be parallels with the Civil War.
“That could be supported,” says a student, “because they have a North Pole and a South Pole in the story. There are two opposite, opposing factions.”
“And in the end,” another student expounds, “Grant and Lee get married. It’s like the country coming together after the war.”
A thesis is born
“I got a theory,” says one person, as the class debates whether a character’s reality is actually an hallucination. “Increasing climate change happened on the planet – there were opiate plants, a jungle, so maybe they took opiates.”
Others mention the subjugation of aliens harvesting the addictive ‘fervel’ leaves, and Sexton concurs: “I don’t think we can underestimate the whole notion of colonization.”
On break, someone makes another connection: “Grant has a fire gun that annihilates the whole culture,” she says, “and we’re exploiting other cultures for their inflatable crops today.”
Diversity across the universe
While science fiction makes many think of Isaac Asimov, the genre has grown in recent decades.
“I think black writers have changed some of the topics that are raised,” says Sexton. “And Samuel Delaney brings up gender and sexuality, things we had never seen previously in science fiction.”
I think it’s the same thing Octavia Butler does,” he says, “with issues of race. I’m thinking of ‘Bloodchild’, and her novel Kindred.”
Sexton admits to being a “bookworm” as a child, and read 2001: A Space Odyssey, in order to understand the movie.
“I always liked science fiction as a kid because it took me out of my everyday world. It opened up all these possibilities, and I never saw the stuff I read in science fiction as not being able to happen. I just saw it as not happening now.”
