SF lovers - Interview with George Slusser

[Exapno_Mapcase]

Most of you won’t know the name of George Slusser or how much he has meant to the field. He was the curator for the J. Lloyd Eaton Science Fiction Collection at the University of Riverside, which is probably the world’s largest repository of sf, more than 135,000 books. He’s written a ton of books on the subject and started the Eaton Conferences, which has spawned much good scholarship about the field.

I dabbled my toe in the academic side of the field back in the 1970s, and ran into the same issues of snobbery and intellectual elitism he did. A big problem then, besides the academics themselves, was that the total nonfiction on the field could be placed onto a shelf and simply getting your hands on the fiction was often nearly impossible. It’s almost impossible to express just how much better things are than today.

An Interview with: Professor George Slusser – Eaton science fiction collection’s Curator Emeritus

As an overview of one side of the field, this long interview is great. BTW, if you wonder why there are so many glowing mentions of Greg Benford, more than anybody else in the field, remember that the interviewer **is Greg Benford.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

Bumping this, with quotes that may spark some discussion.

Is any difference between Fantastika (la litterature du fantastique) and Fantasy?

This is a big question. The French fantastique is presented by Tzvetan Todorov as a precisely defined literary form, that developed in the 19th century, whose distinguishing feature is “hesitation” between two possible interpretations of the phenomenon at hand–the étrange (rational science explains the phenomenon) and the merveilleux (the phenomenon belongs to a different order of reality, outside the laws of known science). Fantasy (from phantasein–to figure in the mind) is a more general category. Wordsworth distinguished “imagination” from “fancy.” These terms have much the same relation one to the other as SF and fantasy today: the former reaching outside the mind to new visions, the latter arranging and rearranging the “furniture” of the mind within that mind. At its best, fantasy exchanges worlds for our own; at its worst it cultivates escapism.

…

Is science fiction an american invention?

As I said, SF is the product a number of cultures as they react in specific ways to the paradigm shifts brought about by the development of science. There is the Cartesian paradigm, the Evolutionary Paradigm, and in American SF the Emersonian Paradigm. It seems to me that science fiction flourished in America because this Emersonian vision is both dynamic and open-ended, thus better able to negotiate scientific discoveries that impact the so-called “human condition.” Emerson’s vision of center-circumference and power and form, a dynamic focused on the individual monad, seems marvelously adaptable to the advent of visual and electronic media, which is the principal venue of SF today. It’s not an American “invention,” but as Emerson says, we have built a better mousetrap.

[Andy_L]

@Exapno_Mapcase

Most of you won’t know the name of George Slusser or how much he has meant to the field. He was the curator for the J. Lloyd Eaton Science Fiction Collection at the University of Riverside, which is probably the world’s largest repository of sf, more than 135,000 books. He’s written a ton of books on the subject and started the Eaton Conferences, which has spawned much good scholarship about the field.

I dabbled my toe in the academic side of the field back in the 1970s, and ran into the same issues of snobbery and intellectual elitism he did. A big problem then, besides the academics themselves, was that the total nonfiction on the field could be placed onto a shelf and simply getting your hands on the fiction was often nearly impossible. It’s almost impossible to express just how much better things are than today.

An Interview with: Professor George Slusser – Eaton science fiction collection’s Curator Emeritus

As an overview of one side of the field, this long interview is great. BTW, if you wonder why there are so many glowing mentions of Greg Benford, more than anybody else in the field, remember that the interviewer **is Greg Benford.

Thanks for this.

[Natlaw]

Interesting read, never really realized academic research of SF is done.

@Exapno_Mapcase

I dabbled my toe in the academic side of the field back in the 1970s, and ran into the same issues of snobbery and intellectual elitism he did.

Slusser’s attitude to rap music, fantasy, “BitLit” (vampires, zombies and werewolves) etc. does sound a bit snobbish though. Vlad Dracula in romanian SF does get an exception :).
He even goes so far as to blame video games (based on military SF) for school schootings.

I agree that the classic, scientific SF is more literate (or phylosophical) about how humans adapt to new science, that does not mean there is no fantasy without worthwhile moral/ethical dilemma’s or how to adapt as an outsider (using, say, a vampire as allorgy/metafor) to the current world. It might not have science, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad.

He does make a similar distinction with regards to science and technology at the end:

@George Slusser

Alas, with cyberpunk, the technology overtook the science, we do not even care how computers are conceived and “work,” we simply use them. However, we must remember Asimov’s definition: it’s both scientific AND technological advancement that impact human beings…

In that sense, a cyberpunk is more realistic: nowadays you interact more with technology you don’t understand how it works or at least cannot repair on your own.