In May of 2024, I connected over email with Steven Shaviro and Mark Bould, the co-editors of This is Not a Science Fiction Textbook, an introduction to the world of science fiction. The collection includes dozens of short but incisive essays on the history and theory of science fiction as a genre, along with deeper dives into individual themes, sub-genres, and seminal texts. As a writer and historian with a long-standing professional interest in—and even longer-standing personal love for—science fiction novels, I was so excited to engage with their work. Our conversation highlighted the upswell of recent excitement, both in popular culture and in academia, around the imaginative potential of science fiction in the face of twenty-first century challenges. The transcript of our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Libby O’Neil: Your book is called This is Not a Science Fiction Textbook. I know that the titling structure came from the publisher, but I found it an interesting provocation. If this is not a science fiction textbook, what is it? Can you talk a bit about how you imagined this book, and who you wanted to read it? Alternatively, what would a science fiction textbook have looked like?
Steven Shaviro: I think that the reason for this title (suggested by the publishers; it is part of a series) is to signal an innovative approach. This book will not tell students what science fiction actually is in any well-determined way, because that is a bad way of introducing the subject. Like many other categories we commonly use, “science fiction” is not an entirely rigorous concept. It has vague boundaries, and it is nearly always possible to find counter-examples to any attempt at clear definition. This does not mean it is so loose as to be meaningless; but, like other categories and concepts, “science fiction” is a tool that is often useful, but that can only be used if one remains aware of its limits. Saying that the book is “not a textbook” is a way of indicating that, although we suggest various theories of how science fiction works (Part 1), a loose history of science fiction (Part 2), and a multitude of key concepts with associated examples (Part 3), we make no claim that such categorizations and classifications are definitive.
Mark Bould: The book/series was pitched as being for folks who’d taken a degree a few years ago and were maybe toying with the idea of getting back into higher education, or just wanted to pick up on an interest that had fallen by the wayside. Trying to write for that kind of reader was the challenge that really drew me to the project despite there being no space in my schedule. I’ve written for and presented to all kinds of audiences, but I know writing an actual textbook is beyond my skills and patience: I have no idea how to do that voice; I am not systematic enough; and I can’t fake that kind of measured “objectivity.” Not being a textbook frees you from the scourge of “balance,” from the need to pretend you don’t have a politics.
It also allows you greater freedom to make choices. We wanted to emphasize the contemporary, which the last and largest section of the book does, to foreground voices central to the genre now, and to collaborate with the younger academics shaping the future of SF studies. (I took on the well-established theoretical and historical material, and all the paraphernalia, so they could run free with the cool new stuff.) So where a textbook would be obligated to, say, dutifully plod through the “golden age” of Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke, we can prioritize women writers, which according to my laborious spreadsheet-keeping, we do, and not just in the chapters devoted to specific novels by women, but reading through the book. Or it can decide, following a chat with David Hartley, who’d already agreed to write the chapters on disability, to add in a pair on neurodiversity—and get him to write them. Or it can heed Katie Stone; she’d agreed to write the chapters on Queer SF, rejected my suggestions for a novel to focus on, selected another that I’d already read and not been particularly impressed by—Rivers Solomon’s The Deep—and showed me quite how much I’d missed. (She did the same to me with most of the titles I’d thought would work for that chapter’s further reading, persuading me to read a dozen or so more, some of which made it onto that list and some of which appear elsewhere in the book.)
That’s the beauty of working with the new kids on the block: You learn so much from them. Science fiction now is not the SF I grew up on, and that is fantastic. All the old stuff’s still there, but it looks so different from here, and the field is exploding in a million different directions right now. (It is also quite exhausting and makes you glad to have some trusty old collaborators in the mix, too, like Steve Shaviro, Roger Luckhurst, and Sherryl Vint, who you can rely on to produce quality challenging stuff on time, and who have been edited by you before so know what to expect.)
I also loved the format’s challenge of writing 500- or 1000-word chapters (anyone who’s worked with me will tell you I take perverse delight in editing down) and of helping academics to find a different voice. I’d hoped we’d be able to do the whole thing without a Works Cited list anywhere, but we didn’t quite pull that off.
Throughout the book, the various contributors return again and again to the question of genre. We have science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, climate fiction, cyberpunk, weird fiction . . . The list could go on. To some extent, these generic categories are simply marketing tools. But they also offer narrative conventions, communities, traditions, and readerly expectations. How did you approach the question of genre when writing and editing this book?
Mark Bould: When I was coming up, studying SF was still a little disreputable, so I absolutely relished claiming things that were not labeled SF were actually SF, and the more respectable the better, just to wind people up. To my surprise, it also wound up a lot of people in SF culture and SF studies who had spent years fighting to establish and retain an identity for the genre. But then the ground shifted under us all, SF moved from the periphery to the core of contemporary culture, and many people stopped having such problems. A lot of people are a lot more comfortable with the idea that SF is a discursive object—not a thing—and that it has no essence or timeless identity. Which isn’t to say there isn’t still a lot of elitist nonsense out there—like Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan claiming they do not write SF, rather than admitting that they just write quite mediocre SF; like the middlebrow broadsheet journalists who keep insisting climate fiction is radically distinct from and definitely not science fiction.
But the exciting stuff is in the new labels that emerge from below. Afrofuturism as a label did not quite do that (it was coined by a White critic), but the flourishing of daughter species did (Africanfuturism, Africanjujuism, Indigenous futurism, Latinx futurism, and many many others), arising as strategic identities to draw attention to the existence of diverse works produced within specific communities, to leverage and support each other, give voice and bring visibility, and to relativize and provincialize the Honkyfuturism or Gavachofuturism that is often the default version of the genre people imagine. (Sadly, the obviously useful—and probably more acceptable—term “Anglofuturism” has already been seized by White supremacists as part of their pseudo-identity politics.)
Steven Shaviro: Genre classifications and distinctions are useful tools, as long as we do not think they are more rigorous and absolute than they really are. No text, or work of cultural production, is ever entirely fresh and new; it inherits a lot from previous texts and works. This explains both the similarities across time in a given genre, and their differences and changes over time. Genres give us a loose set of expectations and orientations; these expectations and orientations are both conformed to, and violated, in new works. Innovation and invention are best understood against an already-existing background. I often like books that transgress against norms and run counter to expectations; but without there being norms and expectations in the first place, going against them would also be impossible.
Building on this question of genre: Do you think the genre of science fiction (or its cultural position) has changed over the last few decades?
Mark Bould: Absolutely. In terms of audiovisual media—film, TV, games—SF is undeniably one of the central cultural forms of our time. Blockbuster movies, streaming platform original content, transmedia franchise universes: SF is ubiquitous and popular in a way it never was before. At the same time, the boundary between mainstream SF and literary fiction is increasingly blurry (in both directions), and although publishing lines are disappearing and the publishing industry is squeezing the genre through its focus on best-sellers, its preference for fantasy, and so on, there is a vibrant community of online magazines, specialist small presses, and crowdfunding projects. So as a form, SF is no longer marginal and, more importantly, no longer the domain of straight white middle-class men (not that it ever was precisely or entirely that).
When we were designing the book, we went in intending, especially in terms of the twenty-one chapters devoted to individual books, to ensure gender parity. In the end, that just wasn’t possible because of the sheer number of works by women, and especially women of color, that are central to the genre right now. We behaved ourselves, though, and were careful not to have just one token novel by a man . . .
Steven Shaviro: Yes, science fiction has changed radically over the decades, as is also the case for other genres, modes, and forms of expression. This is a broader historical process; there have been frequent changes over the past century of science fictional creation. One significant change in the twenty-first century has been the proliferation of works by women, gays and lesbians, people of color, and so on. Another change has been the fuzzing of boundaries between what used to be called “hard” science fiction (with an emphasis on science and technology) and what used to be called “social” science fiction (with an emphasis on multiple cultures, and with reference more to anthropology and sociology than to physics and chemistry). This is not all that surprising, in a time of radical change, both technologically and socially, and increased awareness of points of view that were excluded from notice and discussion in the past.
It’s easy to define science fiction through its close relationship with the future. It is set in the future, it predicts the future, and often, it ends up changing the future. How does this focus on futurity shape the stories being told?
Mark Bould: I think the focus on futurity is only one aspect of what SF does. Raymond Williams gives us a way to think about this when he describes a culture—its structure, institutions, communities, ideology, and so on—containing dominant, residual, and emergent elements. And while we might think that SF focuses more of its energy than, say, the contemporary literary novel on the emergent elements, for conflict it does also need to mediate the dominant and residual elements of our culture; and the more a particular SF story addresses, whether consciously or not, the social/cultural/political/economic context in which it was produced and circulates, the more that focus on the emergent will curve back on itself to address the dominant and the residual.
Or to put it another way, people are often invested in the idea the SF is about “extrapolation,” that is, observing current trends and tendencies and asking, “What if this goes on?” But in a classic 1975 essay on Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness, Fredric Jameson looked at this differently by seeing what happened on the level of individual sentences, and what he discovered was a mixture of familiar and unfamiliar objects—stone castles, say, and motorized vehicles with caterpillar tracks—that originate from different moments in history and thus in some sense do not belong together. Although he does not really pursue this observation very far, I think it is reasonable to suggest that what he was seeing was, on the textual level, a version of what Trotsky would call “combined and uneven development”—William Gibson’s version of this was the observation that “the future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.” And that is a large part of what SF does, often without realizing it: It offers a map of our own world, shows us fundamental structures of our world that typically escape other modes of fiction.
Steven Shaviro: I have a new book of science fiction criticism, Fluid Futures: Science Fiction and Potentiality, and it is largely focused on the subject of futurity in science fiction. I don’t think that science fiction authors actually claim to predict the future. What they are most interested in, rather, is a range of potentialities that could happen in the course of future development. In other words, science fiction often takes the form of projecting or extrapolating trends that actually exist in the present, and looking at what might happen if they continue and expand. For instance, what happens if the world population continues to increase? What happens if environmental degradation accelerates, leading to mass extinctions and a poisoned ecosystem? What happens if there is a nuclear war? Or, projecting further out, how will human beings’ sense of ourselves change as we expand to other planets of the solar system and even to other stars, or as we encounter intelligent alien life?
At the same time, this collection does an excellent job showing how even futuristic science fiction engages with the world as it is and as it once was. Mark, in light of your section “Historicising the Present,” I wonder if you could speak to how stories about the future engage with history.
Mark Bould: One of the great potentials of SF is its ability to relativize our own experience, to put it in different contexts. The Copernican revolution in astronomy and its aftermath showed that the world we live in is just an insignificant speck in the vastness of the cosmos; the geological revolution, associated with Charles Lyell, and its aftermath showed us that our lifespans are similarly dwarfed by the temporal vastness of the cosmos; the Darwinian revolution showed us that not only are we just a contingent and mutable form but also that we are just one animal species among myriad others. SF is predicated on this scientific, secular worldview. It situates us in a specific time (and place) within all this vastness; but at the same time, it struggles with agency through adopting primarily (but my no means universally) adventure or Romance forms which privilege the individual protagonist who must, in some way, demonstrate their ability to act, to do things, to make changes and alter outcomes.
And any SF story set in the future doubles down on some of this: It treats the present as the history of the future. It posits and, to work, must persuade the reader that there is a plausible route from here to there. A great early example of SF authors trying to figure this out comes in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backwards: 2000–1888 and William Morris’s News from Nowhere. Bellamy’s novel, often described quite bizarrely as “socialist,” explains that its utopian future arose from one company growing so big as to literally monopolize the whole of the US economy and then, for no clear reason, abandoning the exploitation absolutely core to the way it operates, and becoming a benign, paternalistic state. Bellamy puts all his faith in the abstract market and the exercise of monopoly power, and does not trust people to intervene, to act, to shape their own futures. Morris, whose work is much more clearly socialist, but agrarian rather than urban, devotes a long section to describing a succession of human actions—a revolution—that created his utopia. People with different sensibilities will respond to these approaches very differently, but if the novel works for them it is partly because the author has persuaded them of the plausibility of this utopian future arising from the current mix of residual, dominant, and emergent elements.
If you were to recommend one book or short story that’s mentioned in the book, what would it be and why?
Mark Bould: I suppose the book that most caught me by surprise is Samuel R. Delany’s Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, which came out in 2011 and had been sitting unread on my shelf ever since, and is now on one of the recommended further reading lists. It’s massive—900 pages—and the overtly SF elements are a long way in the background for most of the novel’s sixty-year span. It focuses on the life-partnership between two Black men, Eric and Morgan, who meet in their late teens, and on their position in and their relationship with a marginalized but Black gay utopian community, the Dump, in the Georgia backwoods. It includes hundreds of pages of detailed descriptions of not-exactly-vanilla gay male sex: anonymous and not-anonymous group sex, urine-drinking, semen-cocktail-guzzling, mucus-eating, shit-eating, and more. And it’s not necessarily easy to keep going with a book like that, but partway through, this concatenation of sexual incidents and adventures transforms into a really quite beautiful and deeply moving depiction of a couple and a community caring for each other, often in quite radical ways, and always in conditions not of their making.
Libby O’Neil is a writer, teacher, and historian from Kansas City. She is currently a PhD candidate in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University, where she is writing a dissertation about scientific holism in the twentieth century.
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