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 meaning of that which precedes the establishment of paradise on earth); much sf is just interested in “thought experiments” of how the world might be different, if we had different genders or family arrangements or politics or gravity or any number of variables, but these visions are not necessarily or even frequently ones of “progress and utopia,” just difference. Second, while I would agree that “utopia’ is not achievable, I think that sf which is utopian tends to be more an example of what Fredric Jameson might call the “utopian impulse” to make things better (following the German utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch), and that is certainly achievable. Progress is an even more ambivalent term, and colloquially it had tended to mean “new and improved science and technology” – again, certainly something achievable; but whether this kind of narrowly defined “progress” is a good thing or not is debatable. Certainly the kind of “progress” that Western European cultures offered to those they colonized was disastrous for those cultures. So “progress” is also in the eye of the beholder.
Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” is very informed by SF; but how has this text affected SF writing since it was first published?
The influence of Haraway’s essay on academic criticism in the field has been pervasive, including its influence on my own work. Simply put, without the influence of Haraway I do not think I would have conceptualized and written about sf and STS as I have, and I might not even be working in the field of sf without the influence of her work. What I find exciting about the field is thinking of the genre as a sort of vernacular theory about the influence of science and technology on daily life – and about the influence of the creative imagination on how we conceive of and practise science – and this perspective is one that I take from Haraway’s work, including this essay. The only fiction I know that is overtly influenced by Haraway is Marge Piercy’s Body of Glass (1991) (published as He, She and It in the US) which rethinks the cyborg specifically through the kind of feminist politics that Haraway celebrates in this essay. That book has gone on to influence number other writers, feminist and more, and so ideas from the Manifesto filter into sf through its influence. In terms of visual arts, Afrofuturist artist John Jennings has done a series of works inspired by the Manifesto and using it to think through the cyborg experience of enslaved African Americans. His vision is the more dystopian side of this posthuman figure, but it too begins with Haraway and has had an influence on other work that followed. You can see a few examples of his work here.
To what extent can science fiction stories be subject to irrelevance as the gap between “science fiction” and “science fact” shrinks over time?
If I understand this question properly, it is asking something like “what’s the point of sf anymore since science fact is now doing all these things that were recently only seen in sf.” From one point of view, this idea of a shrinking gap between “science fiction” and “science fact” is not anything new; if we date the emergence of sf, as I do, with the technologically saturated societies of the late 19th century (following Roger Luckhurst’s work e.g. in Science Fiction [2005]; but remember that this is MY preferred definition of sf, not a universal one as discussed above), then this kind of writing only emerged precisely when the rapidity of new inventions and their influence on daily life was widely felt. Thus sf is a literature that emerges precisely because “science fact” is changing the world through technology and bringing to life things previously not thought possible. One thing that is different now, though, is that we live more than 100 years out from the first sf, and so while early sf was responding to such technologies as a new thing in social life, we now live with a knowledge of both the “failed futures” that never materialized from the writings (jet packs, etc.) and with inventions that seem to us like sf brought to life since we have seen versions of this in fiction (so, for me, talking to Siri is sort of like Star Trek crew talking to their computer). I think this makes sf more rather than less relevant, though, since responding to and understanding the influence of science and technology on our lives has only become more important in this last 100 or so years. I think we see evidence of this in the number of “mainstream” writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michel Faber, Colson Whitehead, and Cormac McCarthy who turn to sf techniques and settings in their work. Critic Gary Wolfe talks about this as “evaporating genres” (in his 2011 monograph of the same name) – the disappearance of sf not because it is gone but because it has sort of become part of the “air” of all culture, infiltrating and shaping all other genres now.
Could SF scholarship exist without Marxism?
Scholarship on sf could certainly exist without Marxism – there is lots of formalist and psychoanalytic and other sf scholarship that is not Marxist. The origins of the sf scholarship were more in structuralism and thematic criticism than in Marxism. At the same time, however, sf scholarship would be very different than it is today if Darko Suvin had not made a significant and field-defining intervention into the genre with Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979). That book was so influential in shaping people’s sense of the genre – even if they largely ignored its Marxist framework – that it is impossible to imagine how sf scholarship would look without this intervention. Of course not everyone agrees with or follows Suvin, but I do think it is impossible to work in this field, at least as it exists right now, without being aware of him.
How important are the dualities of cleanliness versus dirtiness and health/hygiene versus disease/illness to the genre of SF?
I don’t think these binaries are more important to sf than any number of other thematic approaches, in the way that, for example, binaries such as nature/culture, male/female, human/nonhuman have become central to scholarship in the genre. But sf has a lot in common with cultural anthropology and these binaries have been central to a lot of work in anthropology, and from that point of view (interrogating cultural norms, looking at home “morals” are culturally relative, etc.) I think there are many ways that this kind of framework could be productively used to analyze sf. A lot of my work is influenced by Foucault and I see a homology between his genealogies of dividing practices and the destabilizing of norms that is central to sf. A recent PhD graduate from the University of Warwick, Rhys Williams, has just written an excellent thesis on sf and genre theory (titled "The Political Imagination in Contemporary Fantastic Fiction") that uses Mary Douglas' theory of pollution to think about how the history of sf criticism has been very interested in notions of “purity” vs. “contamination” when it comes to defining the boundary of sf from other genres.
Works of SF often use visions of the future to explore or comment on issues in the present. However, these visions of the future, rather than the exploration of issues within the present, are often what works of SF are known by and remembered for, particularly in the wider public consciousness. So how do, or how should, works of SF evoke visions of the future that remain pertinent to the present?
As many critics have said, sf is not really about the future but is about the present. Ray Bradbury has quipped that his job is not to predict the future but to prevent it. So I guess that visions of the future in sf, even ones that never came to pass, remain pertinent to the present in two ways. First, if they are well done, they remind us that science and technology are deeply entwined with culture in myriad ways, that you can’t simply have a new “gadget” that doesn’t radically transform other parts of a culture, be it personal relationships, employment, education, values, etc. So, such sf reminds us that it is “pertinent” to think about science as part of a whole culture that is informed by and informs science. Second, the “datedness” or outlandishness of such never realized futures can help us to stop taking the technology that surrounds us for granted as inevitable and necessary, and help us see that it has a history and could have been otherwise. Again, in well done science fiction this helps us to remember that science and technology are neither inherently good or evil but rather are reflective of the culture that develops them and the ends to which that culture puts its innovations.
Does the concept of the cyborg limit itself to Western interpretation only?
I’m not sure I fully understand this concept either, but the simple answer is no. Japanese culture has probably had a much bigger influence on our thinking about the cyborg than has “Western” culture, although these distinctions are somewhat forced since ideas from philosophers and writers pass back and forth between these cultures.
There seems to be a long-standing convention that SF writers are often thought not to write as well as others (who are labelled "literary" or the like), because the value of SF lies elsewhere. Do you think there is any truth to this, or could you name some SF writers whose prose you think is as good as anyone else’s?
I don’t think it is true that science fiction writers are better or worse prose stylists than any other writer, but I do think this is an idea that persists because of a continued association of sf with the pulps. Pulp writers of the 1920s and 1930s did not emphasize style (which does not mean all were terrible) but by the 1950s many sf writers were doing so, and of course the New Wave foregrounds style particularly. This is not really something that propels my research and so I’m not the best person to answer questions about great sf stylists, but Gene Wolfe is always celebrated for his style, writers such as J.G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock changed the boundaries of how style could work in sf, China Miéville is a very careful prose stylist who matches his prose to other aspects of each work as Neil Easterbrook has explored in his scholarship on Miéville (see his review of Embassytown for the Los Angeles Review of Books here). I personally enjoy William Gibson’s style and find it central to the effect of his work, although I was disappointed on this front by his most recent novel, The Peripheral (2014).
In your opinion, what more needs to be done to open up SF studies to texts from around the world, or those published in languages other than English?
I think much of what needs to be done has, and is, being done and so this is a very exciting time to be studying sf. Changes in the publishing industry have been key to this, with new venues for ebook and independent presses (FutureFire, Rosarium, etc.) loosening up the restrictions on who gets published that existed in an earlier model when a few editors at major publishing houses had control over the field. Similarly in film new distribution methods such as vimeo and new (and cheap) digital editing tools have meant that many more people can get their vision out there than was possible before. Of course distribution is still dominated by industry giants in both media, but things are improving. At the same time, both fan and academic discussions have recently focused a lot on questions of diversity within the field and this has only made more prominent those independents publishing sf from around the work and success breeds more success. The key limitation now, I think, is that English remains the dominant language of scholarship (not only in sf but generally) and so works needs to be translated into English to achieve much circulation and to become part of the critical tradition. Translation is difficult and time-consuming work and often there is no money to support such work. So I think funding for translations is the next thing to address.
Banner image by sdobie under a CC BY-NC license.
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