4 Strangers in a Strange Text: An Introduction to How and Why We Read Science Fiction in College

Introduction: What is Science Fiction?

While I was teaching a class on popular fiction recently, I noticed a topic that kept coming up with my students was debate over which science fiction stories we read were “real science fiction” or not, and which ones were “more science fiction” than others. These were great discussions, but what we found was that every student defined science fiction in a different way. Some put a lot of emphasis on the “science” part and demanded thorough scientific explanations in their stories, while others expected the setting had to be in a certain place like space or the future and others had a more open view of what might qualify as science fiction. None of them were “wrong,” because we as readers and writers decide what a genre should be, or could be. By understanding as many viewpoints as possible, though, we gain a stronger foothold from which to understand science fiction as a whole.

Science fiction is a genre: a category, or type, of story. This genre often includes imagining the future and different worlds: what kind of technologies are to come, what kind of societies might develop, what kind of beings might exist. The genre of science fiction often includes tropes: features or ideas that are typical of a genre, such as space travel, time travel, future societies (or the collapse of our present society), and alien discoveries and encounters.

One thing most scholars of science fiction agree on is that the science fiction genre is difficult to define – in large part because it includes so many different kinds of stories. Over time, like all genres of literature, science fiction (often abbreviated “SF”) took on a life of its own, grew, changed, and came to include a diverse array of writers who each contributed to what science fiction is today. That means we can’t restrict the definition to what any one person has declared that science fiction is, or what it was “supposed” to be at any particular moment in time.

Many great science fiction writers and thinkers have proposed their own interesting definitions for science fiction, and together these ideas can help us to gain a broad overview of the genre. For example, Isaac Asimov wrote that many science fiction stories stem from the prompts “What if-”, “If only-”, and “If this continues-” (Mollman), emphasizing that science fiction is about possibilities of what might happen, often in the future. Many science fiction writers like to begin with the question “What if?”

Philip K. Dick wrote that a science fiction world “must differ from the [real world] in at least one way, and this one way must be sufficient to give rise to events that could not occur in our society—or in any known society present or past […] this is the essence of science fiction, the conceptual dislocation within the society so that as a result a new society is generated” (9-10). The idea of a new society is a common one in science fiction, where writers often imagine entirely new cultures, governments, and ways of being.

Ursula K. Le Guin examined how science fiction “is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future” (xi). However, she argued, “though extrapolation is an element in science fiction, it isn’t the name of the game by any means” and declared that “science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive” (xiv). In other words, she believed science fiction wasn’t just a way of imagining the future, but also of understanding the truth about our own here and now.

Some readers believe that stories must have a scientific explanation for all of their features in order to qualify, thus creating a strong separation between science fiction and fantasy. However, other readers include a broader range of stories that also feature supernatural or magical elements in science fiction. For example, one of the most iconic science fiction franchises, Star Wars, prominently features spiritual and magical elements that are deliberately presented as unscientific.

Every story is unique, and some science fiction stories might focus on advanced technology, space exploration, or inter-species war, while others focus on philosophy or social and political issues, like identity and discrimination. Just like science fiction is about imagining what can be, it is up to us to imagine what science fiction can be.

Culture and “Cognitive Estrangement”

One of the most influential science fiction scholars, Darko Suvin, has famously described science fiction as the literature of “cognitive estrangement” (Metamorphoses). “Cognitive” refers to the way we think about, know, and understand things – the workings of our minds. And in this sense, “estrangement” can mean both to make something strange, and also to be separate or distanced from something, making it unfamiliar. The term “cognitive estrangement” refers to the way that science fiction makes us think about ideas in new ways, because they are presented to us through interesting and strange worlds, people, and situations. Even things that we are used to thinking about in the real world – like technology, relationships, wars, and the mundane routines of daily life – are turned into something unfamiliar, forcing us to re-evaluate them in new ways.

Another useful and important term for the study of science fiction also comes from Suvin: the “novum.” This word, now commonplace in the study of science fiction, means the key difference or change between the real world and the world in the science fiction story (Poetics). For example, a science fiction story might take place in a world where aliens have already arrived and live among us – this key difference from our world is the novum of that story. Or a story could take place in a future where time travel has been invented, or where humans are populating new planets. Those are also examples of nova (the plural of novum).

The novum of a science fiction story, the strange and interesting disruption of reality, is what makes ordinary things unfamiliar, creating cognitive estrangement. This is important to the way we read and think about science fiction because in many ways, this genre – even when it is about faraway planets and strange creatures – tells us a lot of important things about our own world, about our own reality and culture.

As scholar Sherryl Vint explains in her book Science Fiction: A Guide for the Perplexed, science fiction “is often described as a genre that has the power to literalize metaphor, to build worlds that capture something true yet unrepresentable in the literary mode of realism” (5). Science fiction can show us true things about ourselves precisely because it makes things different and strange.

As author John Green describes in his Crash Course series of videos on English literature, using figurative language, including metaphors like “my heart has shattered into a million pieces” or “I am obliterated” helps to communicate “complicated and nuanced experiences” through text in a way that audiences can not only understand but empathize with. This kind of writing can help us gain “a fuller understanding of lives other than [our] own” in an empathetic way (Green). By taking metaphors and making them literal, or factually true inside the story, science fiction as a genre provides an interesting way to understand and empathize with complicated experiences. For example, you might have an experience in real life where it feels like you have traveled through time – such as when you visit your childhood home, or see a friend you haven’t seen in many years. A science fiction story where these events happen because of actual time travel can help readers understand and empathize with your experience in an interesting new way.

Some readers interpret science fiction works as allegories, or stories where imaginary things “stand in” for real ones. For example, bigotry against alien species in science fiction can highlight racism in the real world. As Sherryl Vint points out in her examination, thinking deeply about fictional cultures forces us to examine our own culture. Allegories can help us to question our own ideas, even ideas that we would normally be defensive about or not even realize we had. For example, Star Trek famously addressed issues of discrimination and prejudice, but while audiences might react negatively or closed-mindedly to stories that question racism in our own society, using alien societies can make audiences more open to the message.

Some readers view science fiction as extrapolation, as we looked at in the Introduction of this article: taking real-world issues and imagining how they might continue into the future. For example, dystopian stories about abusive and harmful societies or governments, and post-apocalyptic stories about the world after society has collapsed, can be seen as cautionary tales: warnings about what we shouldn’t do. Importantly, many readers also see science fiction as a way to imagine a better future – a way to think about what we want a just and equitable world to look like, and how we might reach that goal.

Some Ways We Read SF: Sub-genres, Language, and Discovery

One way that we can think about the ideas in science fiction is through the “sub-genres” that science fiction stories are a part of. Sub-genres are smaller categories inside the larger category of science fiction. Dystopian stories, for example, have a certain flavor that is a little different from post-apocalyptic stories, although both are similarly critical of society. “Space operas” like Star Wars and “space Westerns” like Firefly can have similar plots, but feature different types of characters, aesthetics, and themes. A lot of scholars find interesting ways to compare and contrast these genres and their tropes in order to make interpretations about what these stories mean, and what they tell us about our own world. It’s important to remember that genres and sub-genres change over time, and many stories can be classified into many sub-genres: these categories are more like shifting, malleable interpretations than hard and fast rules.

It’s also valuable to think about how science fiction itself is part of other, bigger categories, like the overall category of fiction itself. Science fiction is also part of “speculative fiction”: a big tent that also includes all kinds of stories that take place outside of ordinary reality, including fantasy, alternate history, superhero fiction, and more. Some writers, like Jeff Vandermeer in his writing guide Wonderbook, use the term “imaginative fiction” when they talk about writing in these genres. These larger terms are useful because they help us to think about what stories have in common (and what they don’t).

Thinking about big and small categories together as part of an overall landscape of speculative fiction leads to even more innovative stories, and also to new ideas about stories. Writers (or readers) of a genre demanding that stories all adhere to strict categories or follow strict rules, and devaluing stories that stray from those rules, would only restrict creative new ideas, making the landscape of genres like science fiction repetitive and unoriginal. After all, popular genres like science fiction only arose through the combination of new ideas, and through the remixing of features from previous forms. It has always been a part of science fiction to experiment and to blend forms in new ways.

The way language works in science fiction can also be distinctive and meaningful. In some cases, how the story is told – the words on the page – is just as important as what happens in the story. Of course this can be true in any genre, but science fiction often uses language in uncommon ways, such as inventing new words or entire new languages, or occasionally creating deliberate confusion and ambiguity. Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange, for example, includes an invented slang that incorporates Russian words into English in new ways, and in George Orwell’s novel 1984, the new terms that people use are an important part of learning about their fictional society. Just like figuring out the world of the setting and its rules is part of the enjoyment and purpose of reading about a reality different from our own, figuring out how the language works can be a big part of the science fiction experience.

When they started reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Left Hand of Darkness, for example, many of my students complained that it was hard to make sense of the plot when new words like shifgrethor and kemmer were constantly used – terms that the characters in the story already understood and spoke regularly without much explanation. As the novel went on, though, my students started to make sense of these words too, through the natural way humans acquire language: by being exposed to it, a lot. They also came to see how these terms were complicated and the ideas they represented were important for the story, in a way that couldn’t be simply translated or explained right away. We were supposed to slowly come to understand these ideas more and more, in order for the story to have as much meaning and impact as it does.

Beyond creating new words or new languages, science fiction also uses our own current-day language in interesting ways. As science fiction author and scholar Samuel Delany notes, “There are many strings of words that can appear both in a science fiction text and in an ordinary text of naturalistic fiction. But when they appear in a naturalistic text we interpret them one way, and when they appear in an SF text we interpret them another” (296). As an example, he elaborates: “The phrase ‘her world exploded’ in a naturalistic text will be a metaphor for a female character’s emotional state; but in an SF text, if you had the same words— ‘her world exploded’—you’d have to maintain the possibility that they meant: a planet belonging to a woman blew up” (296). Therefore, it’s perfectly natural for us as readers to feel unsure about exactly how language is working in a science fiction story, and to be surprised as we continue reading. We might even have to go back to reevaluate something we misunderstood before.

Don’t be discouraged when you’re reading science fiction and you feel disoriented, confused, or even temporarily lost. It doesn’t mean you’re missing something you should “already” know, it doesn’t mean you’re reading the story “wrong,” and it definitely doesn’t mean that you’re a bad or unintelligent reader. In fact, realizing that something is strange or doesn’t make sense yet shows the opposite: that you’re aware of the strangeness of the text and thinking about its effect on you as a reader, which is a sign of attentive and invested reading. In many cases, feeling confused and unsure means the story is working exactly as it was designed to work. You are experiencing the “liminality,” or the strange and temporary transition space, that happens as you are on the way to gaining a full understanding of the story, and that liminal space is part of the intention of the story. Figuring out the way the universe of the story works is part of the experience of science fiction, and if you continue to explore and think about the story, you’ll make interesting discoveries along the way.

An Astoundingly Brief History

Science fiction has a broad and varied history, and especially after learning about the different ways the genre is defined, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that there is disagreement over exactly when it began, and what the “first” science fiction story was. The debate will never be settled, since everyone thinks of science fiction in a different way, but in general most scholars consider the SF genre as we know it to harken back to the 1800s. Many consider Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, first published in 1818, the first science fiction novel (Aldiss 3). Authors like Jules Verne, famous for science fiction novels like Journey to the Center of the Earth and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, also created important touchstone stories that helped to establish the genre later in the 1800s, and so did H.G. Wells, known for The Time Machine and War of the Worlds at the end of that century.

In the early 20th century, science fiction grew more popular and commercial, in part thanks to science fiction magazines like Amazing Stories and Analog/Astounding Stories founded in the 1920s and 1930s, which would publish several short stories in every issue as well as providing a space for letters and conversation about the genre. Some consider this the time period when science fiction as we know it today really arose, although some argue that the genre was only “codified” during this period: arranged, organized, and defined more cohesively (Vint). Many writers during this period emphasized the science in science fiction, like Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. Meanwhile others wrote exciting “pulp” adventures with a focus on action, like Edgar Rice Burroughs.

In the 1960s and 1970s, though, as society dealt with social, political, and cultural changes including the civil rights movement and the struggle for women’s rights and equality, these issues were reflected in science fiction as well. Authors like Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel Delany, James Tiptree Jr., and J.G. Ballard, among many, were part of new forms like “New Wave” science fiction and writers of “social science fiction” who focused more on social and personal issues than previous generations did. At the same time, the U.S. faced concerns related to the Cold War (tensions between the U.S. and Russia that people feared could become a violent war at any moment), the rise of nuclear weapons and nuclear power, and political transitions that created a sense of paranoia in many areas of society. These concerns intersected with cultural trends like preoccupations with UFOs, alien conspiracies, and government cover-ups, which also influenced the tone of many science fiction stories.

The 1980s and 1990s brought new ideas, such as in the sub-genre of cyberpunk, a form of science fiction with a gritty, cynical edge. Cyberpunk highlighted anti-heroes with dark pasts, seedy city underbellies, and intrusive technology in everyday life including “cyberware” incorporated into the human body and “cyberspace,” a digital world that people could enter. The setting of cyberpunk stories often included corrupt or oppressive governments and giant ultra-capitalist mega-corporations who wielded the real power. Stories by writers like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling paved the way for later examples by the likes of Neal Stephenson, and eventually the Wachowskis’ groundbreaking movie The Matrix in 1999.

The invention of new sub-genres only intensified in the 21st century, with science fiction stories for example that focus on climate change (“Cli-Fi”) or biotechnology (“Biopunk”), and on different ways of being human or transcending the physical human state, as in stories concerned with “posthumanism.” In fact, there are so many sub-genres and diverse concerns in the contemporary field of science fiction, written by so many different kinds of authors, that it’s hard to say any one is more important than any other. All of these stories continue to develop new answers to the “What If?” question and imagine new worlds that give us new ways of thinking about our own.

Gatekeeping, Diversification, and the Future

In the United States, the history of science fiction has often been affected by questions of “gatekeeping”: questions of who should write science fiction and be published, and what qualifies as science fiction or not. Audiences often debate what belongs in the category of science fiction – as I mentioned my own students do – but at times, those debates have centered on whether certain people belong in science fiction, due to facets of their identity like race or gender.

One example that can give us insight into these issues is that of John W. Campbell, the editor of the popular and important early science fiction magazine Analog (formerly called Astounding Stories and other names). Campbell was an extremely influential figure in the field, sometimes called “the father of science fiction” (Brown). During the “Golden Era” of science fiction in the 1930s, Campbell famously expressed that he did not believe women could write science fiction (“The History of Women in Sci-Fi”), wrote deridingly about homosexual individuals, and supported racial segregation (Libbey). He praised elements of slavery and claimed Black writers could not write well enough to compete with white writers. Campbell rejected science fiction from Black writers including Samuel Delany (whose ideas we looked at earlier in this article), because he didn’t feel readers “would be able to relate to a black main character” (Libbey). Author Jeanette Ng has stated that Campbell “is responsible for setting a tone for science fiction that haunts this genre to this very day”: a tone that is “male, white, exalting in the ambitions of imperialists, colonialists, settlers and industrialists” (Libbey).

Of course, Campbell is only one individual, but because of his influential position at an important time, his viewpoints had an outsized effect on the science fiction world, and they also reflected agreement from others in the science fiction world. For a long time, women writers were so excluded from the science fiction world that some used male-sounding or gender-neutral pen names, like C.L. Moore and James Tiptree Jr. And author Octavia Butler recounted in the 1980s that her creative writing teacher in college instructed students not to use Black characters because they “drew attention from the intended subject,” a stereotyping belief that provides some insight into why “Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Amerindians, [and] minority characters in general [were] noticeably absent from most science fiction” at the time (17-18).

These issues continue to be part of conversation in the contemporary era. From 2013 to 2017, for example, a group of authors and voters for the Hugo Awards, arguably the largest awards for best science fiction or fantasy, staged an anti-diversity campaign against the nomination of women and non-white writers called the “Sad Puppies.” Based on the “self-absorbed argument that voters couldn’t possibly actually like works by or about women, trans people, gay people, writers of color and so forth,” this group attempted to push their own choices for the award instead, and although they were unsuccessful, they succeeded in gaining publicity for their cause (Robinson).

At the same time, the current science fiction world in the U.S. is becoming more diverse than ever before. Many of the most well-known and successful authors today include not only women and people of color, but also writers from different cultures and backgrounds, and authors who write about diverse lived experiences including queerness, gender nonconformity, indigenous and postcolonial perspectives, and immigrant experiences. Many scholars, publishers, and readers continue to embrace the innovative ideas in science fiction these writers’ voices add, diversifying the field. Works that illustrate a variety of cultures’ science fictional ideas continue to gain popularity, including for example in-demand stories in Afrofuturism, Indigenous science fiction, and stories that highlight the experiences of Asian writers and Latinidad.

Controversies over the classification of work as science fiction or not, debates over who deserves recognition in science fiction, and the passionate response of fans to changes in the science fiction world – all of these issues make one thing clear: science fiction matters. Far from the disdain that science fiction was sometimes treated with in its early days, the genre is now a hotbed for scholarly discussion as well as popular discourse. Readers see important ideas about our world and ourselves in these speculative stories. As it has for so long, science fiction continues to be a site of invention, creation, innovation, change, and imagining what the future of humanity could be.

Works Cited

Aldiss, Brian. Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction. Doubleday, 1973.

Brown, Alan. “The Father of Science Fiction: The Best of John W. Campbell.” Tor, 5 July 2018, https://www.tor.com/2018/07/05/the-father-of-science-fiction-the-best-of-john-w-campbell/

Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange. Reprint Edition, Norton and Company, 2019.

Butler, Octavia. “The Lost Races of Science Fiction.” Transmission, summer 1980, pp. 17-18.

Delany, Samuel. “On Triton and Other Matters: An Interview with Samuel R. Delany.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 17, no. 3, Nov. 1990, pp. 295-324. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4240009

Dick, Philip. “Preface.” The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick. Carol Publishing, 1999.

Green, John. “How and Why We Read: Crash Course English Literature #1.” YouTube, uploaded by Crash Course, 15 Nov. 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSYw502dJNY

“The History of Women in Sci-Fi Isn’t What You Think.” Wired, 2 Feb. 2019, https://www.wired.com/2019/02/geeks-guide-history-women-sci-fi/.

Le Guin, Ursula. “Introduction.” The Left Hand of Darkness. Ace Books, 1987.

Libbey, Peter. “John W. Campbell Award is Renamed After Winner Criticizes him.” New York Times, 28 Aug. 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/books/john-w-campbell-award-jeannette-ng.html.

Mollman, Steven. “Isaac Asimov’s Typology of Science Fiction.” Less Accurate Grandmother, 13 Nov. 2015, https://lessaccurategrandmother.blogspot.com/2015/11/isaac-asimovs-typology-of-science.html.

Orwell, George. 1984. Signet Books, 1961.

Robinson, Tasha. “How the Sad Puppies Won – By Losing.” NPR, 26 Aug. 2015, https://www.npr.org/2015/08/26/434644645/how-the-sad-puppies-won-by-losing.

Suvin, Darko. “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre.” College English, vol. 34, no. 3, Dec. 1972, pp. 372-382. https://www.jstor.org/stable/375141

Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. Yale University Press, 1979.

Vandermeer, Jeff. Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction. Abrams Image, Expanded Edition, 2018.

Vint, Sherryl. Science Fiction: A Guide for the Perplexed. Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.