Why study SF/F?

Why study anything? Often, we have external motivations. Parents hope to avoid truancy laws, so they send their children to school. The child studies to please the parent. That child grows, then chooses a field of study to earn money. But we also have internal motivations. Maybe we seek self-improvement or enlightenment, so we study. Maybe a certain subject brings us pleasure, so we study. How you navigate these external and internal motivations rests partly on your individual psychology, but we all exist within cultural matrixes that value and endorse, implicitly or explicitly, internal and external motivations. What’s the relationship between external and internal motivations in our current society?^[1]

Let’s use a work of science fiction to examine our motivations to study. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s masterwork of science fiction The Dispossessed (1974), Shevek, the protagonist, travels from his anarchist utopia on the moon Anarres to the planet it orbits, Urras. His journey is considered a bit of a scandal; the anarchists had left the capitalist society of Urras 200 years previously with no plan to return. Shevek is a physicist, though, and he does not find support for his ideas among his peers (demonstrations of Shevek’s intellect are seen as “egoizing” by his society). To find a situation where his ideas won’t be rejected immediately, he arranges to travel to Urras to learn what he can about their knowledge of physics. To aid him in this matter, he is given a lectureship at one of Urras’ finest universities.

When Shevek finally goes to teach, things don’t go as planned. He finds moving from a non-hierarchical egalitarian society to a hierarchical goal-oriented one disorienting. On the first day, he informs his students that everyone will receive an “A,” so long as they turn in a final essay. The students grumble. They protest. Why should they work hard if everyone will receive the same grade? Shevek is unsure what to say; there are no grades in his society. It is an idea for which he has zero context. Dumbfounded, he responds, “If you want to do the work, then do it; if you do not want to do the work, then don’t.”

That might seem dismissive, but Shevek simply doesn’t understand the external motivation to learn. He’s a stranger in a strange land. I’m sure you, reader, understand it too well, that external motivation. You want to get good grades so you can get a good job and make your parents happy, so you study, even if you’d rather be playing video games, building cars, or just lounging on a beach somewhere, regardless of whether those activities “pay the bills.” In Shevek’s society, no one would ever study something they did not want to study. Because everyone contributes to the labor and everyone has room and board, they use their free time instead to become physicists or artists or mothers or even idlers, as is their right. For Shevek, his motivation to learn is purely internal because his culture does not value external motivation.

In an ideal world, perhaps we would all pursue only that which we were internally motivated to pursue. In this world, however, we must prepare for jobs. So, then, how will studying SF/F enhance your job prospects?

At Texas A&M university, we have a longstanding connection to the entertainment industry, and our graduates have gone on to work for companies such as Pixar and Netflix. These companies produce a great deal of science fiction and fantasy, so they want employees who are passionate and knowledgeable. Beyond such obvious choices, a minor in a literary discipline produces the communication and literacy skills that every employer values. In fact, companies who employ engineers and coders often lament that their hires have not developed these skills in addition to their other skills. So, if you’re a scientist or engineer who would like more experience with the humanities, SF/F is absolutely for you. In fact, scientists and engineers who read and consume science fiction often find inspiration; in the early days of the Internet, for example, William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) profoundly impacted how the researchers conceived of virtual space. Finally, you may want to teach, or you may want to produce some SF/F of your own. Making money as a writer can be difficult but much less difficult with the popular genres. And heck, who knows, maybe they’ll make a film adaptation of your story. Science fiction films are, after all, the highest grossing films of all time.^[2]

What about those “naive” internal motivations? What sorts of suckers^[3] learn for the sake of learning? As teachers, we hope to instill a passion for learning that extends beyond the classroom. To accomplish this goal, there must be internal motivation. Since there is no better place to start on internal motivation than with what you like, you’re in luck. SF/F is a huge and diverse field of world literature with themes and topics appropriate for all ages and reading levels, and it is incredibly popular. Everyone enjoys and consumes some sort of SF/F^[4]; we want to harness that spark to kindle a deeper interest in literature, culture, and art. SF/F are powerful tools for critical thinking, the kind of self-reflective thinking that changes the world.

SF/F also provides novel and complex ways for thinking about and considering the Other. The Other is any group that exists outside the power structures of a given society. So, in a patriarchal society, woman is Other; in a white supremacist society, Black people are Other; and in a heteronormative society, homosexuality is Other. While almost all forms of literature teach us to empathize with people and perspectives different from our own, none quite do it in the radical way that SF/F does. When an SF/F writer creates a fantasy race, those races are sometimes meant to be allegories for actually existing races, but in the hands of the masters of SF/F, fantasy races are an opportunity to create an entirely new way of being in the world. If our environments shape who we are and how we see the world, the wondrous settings that produce alien races will produce new ways of seeing and being in the world. In this way, SF/F can move beyond the biases of contemporary reality to observe more clearly the mechanisms of power, in-groups, out-groups, and Otherness.

To study SF/F is also to study the very imagination itself. In these genres the imagination reaches its pinnacle, freed as it is from the bonds of mere reality. Many writers have defended the imagination as an important tool to reflect upon reality itself.^[5] Here we must rectify a divide between SF (Science Fiction) on one side and F (Fantasy) on the other. SF is considered the genre of the “not-yet possible,” while Fantasy is considered the genre of the “impossible.” For this reason, many SF critics believe SF is better capable of demonstrating the logical future progression of humankind; thus, they reason, it serves as a better critical tool for reflecting upon contemporary reality than the impossible fictions of fantasy. Even some of the allegedly “not-yet possible” fictions can be profoundly divorced from realistic possibility, and many “impossible” fictions can profoundly affect how we rethink what’s possible in reality. The imagination is a powerful thing, and even when it is most distant from the real-world conditions that fostered it, it is still part of those real-world conditions.

Revisiting Shevek’s words, then, we see that he does not mean to speak harshly to the students. Rather, he wants from them the sort of commitment that comes only from internally motivated engagement. For his students, the results of this internal motivation would be practical; Shevek is a physicist on par with Einstein, and his calculations change the galaxy. Who better to study with if you truly love physics?

For our purposes, to be internally motivated means to think of yourself as a reader of SF/F. To the self-motivated reader, SF/F offers stimulating, exciting, and riveting tools for modeling, reflecting upon, and criticizing reality. To put it another way, where else could you develop critical thinking skills and still have so much fun?