Interview with Sherryl Vint

Interview conducted by Birkbeck's Science Fiction students   Professor Sherryl Vint is author of a number of influential works of scholarship in the fields of science fiction and science and technology studies, including Science Fiction: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury, 2014), The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction (Routledge, 2011) (co-authored with Mark Bould), Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal (Liverpool University Press, 2010), and Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, and Science Fiction (University of Toronto Press, 2007). She is editor of Beyond Cyberpunk: New Critical Perspectives (Routledge, 2010) (with Graham Murphy), The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (Routledge, 2009) (with Mark Bould, Andrew Butler and Adam Roberts) and Fifty Key Figures in Science Fiction (Routledge, 2009) (with Mark Bould, Andrew Butler and Adam Roberts), as well as editor of the journals Science Fiction Studies, Science Fiction Film and Television and Humanimalia. Professor Vint works at the University of California, Riverside where she teaches science fiction, popular culture, technoculture and human-animal studies.   Do you think SF can ever be defined adequately? I’m not sure what is meant by “adequately” here, but I would say that I don’t think sf will ever be defined in what a way that all people agree on the definition. This is a perspective I explore in the Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction (2011) that I co-wrote with Mark Bould, using the idea of “enrolment” taken from science and technology studies (STS) scholar Bruno Latour and using genre theory ideas from Rick Altman’s work on film theory, Film/Genre (1998) (and Jason Mittel’s work on television genre Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture [2004] is very similar, although we didn’t discuss it in this book). Basically all of these approaches, drawing on different critical traditions, argue that definition are always motivated by certain effects that those using the definition want to achieve by defining something, in this case, a genre in a particular way. I use this idea in my most recent book, Science Fiction: A Guide to the Perplexed (2014), to explore a variety of ways that sf might appear depending on how you define it. So, in a way, all definitions are “adequate” to those who use them, and there are areas of overlap among competing definitions, but there are also areas of divergence as well. It all depends on what you “want” sf to be. Why does SF focus so much on progress and utopia, since both are unachievable? First, I think only a sub-set of sf focuses on “progress and utopia”: much sf focuses on apocalyptic or dystopian visions (although even the apocalypse is, from one point of view, a kind of “progress” in its Christian...