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Episode 80 : Scott Selisker on What Makes Science Fiction Beautiful
Meet Scott Selisker, Associate Professor at the University of Arizona and resident expert on science fiction and *teaching* science fiction. His book, "Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons, and American Unfreedom" (2016) is worth checking out on its own merits. He is also the unlucky human responsible for introducing US to Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.'s "The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction," which has spawned not just a seven-episode series on this podcast, but also reshaped our conversations about science fiction (and fantasy) on a macro level. We invited him to come and join us for a conversation about the very macro question of "What makes science fiction beautiful?" Excited words follow.
Side note: Selisker's voice is a sonorous ear-worm you NEED in your life.
Our conversation includes references to a number of formative works of science fiction criticism and fiction, including David Wittenberg's "Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative" (2012), Jennifer Egan's "A Visit from the Goon Squad" (2010), Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go" (2005), Max Barry's "Lexicon" (2013), as well as Marina and Sergey Dyachenko's "Vita Nostra" (2008). We also discussed the "Alien" and "Star Trek" franchises (of COURSE), Ursula K. Le Guin, Nnedi Okorafor's "Binti" series, and Nalo Hopkinson's body of work. Selisker also references Dan Sinykin's article "The Conglomerate Era: Publishing, Authorship, and Literary Form, 1965–2007" in the journal Contemporary Literature and Joseph Campbell and Darko Suvin's competing definitions of science fiction; to read more about these, just look for the Wikipedia page on "Definitions of Science Fiction."
Want to find out more about Scott Selisker? You can find his book "Human Programming" on Amazon, his faculty webpage at https://english.arizona.edu/users/scott-selisker, and his Twitter handle is @sselisker.
We do also want to give shout-outs here in the show-notes to our previous episodes on Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.'s "The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction":
Beauty #1: Fictive Neology (Episode 5)
Beauty #2: Novums (Episode 12)
Beauty #3: Future History (MIA, hard drive failure)
Beauty #4: Imaginary Science (Episode 34)
Beauty #5: The Sublime (Episode 55)
Beauty #6: The Grotesque (Episode 71)
Beauty #7: The Techno-Gatorade (Episode 79)
You can find all of our back episodes on YouTube once they have shuffled off these earthly coils of their SoundCloud first life.
Like our content or our new introduction? Our website is www.imaginaries.net, and you can drop us a line at [email protected] or find us on Twitter at @imaginary_pod. You can find ALL of our back episodes on YouTube, and listen to our episodes on iTunes or SoundCloud. If you would like to help support our work, you can do so at www.ko-fi.com/imaginaries.
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By The Imaginaries
5
66 ratings
Meet Scott Selisker, Associate Professor at the University of Arizona and resident expert on science fiction and *teaching* science fiction. His book, "Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons, and American Unfreedom" (2016) is worth checking out on its own merits. He is also the unlucky human responsible for introducing US to Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.'s "The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction," which has spawned not just a seven-episode series on this podcast, but also reshaped our conversations about science fiction (and fantasy) on a macro level. We invited him to come and join us for a conversation about the very macro question of "What makes science fiction beautiful?" Excited words follow.
Side note: Selisker's voice is a sonorous ear-worm you NEED in your life.
Our conversation includes references to a number of formative works of science fiction criticism and fiction, including David Wittenberg's "Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative" (2012), Jennifer Egan's "A Visit from the Goon Squad" (2010), Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go" (2005), Max Barry's "Lexicon" (2013), as well as Marina and Sergey Dyachenko's "Vita Nostra" (2008). We also discussed the "Alien" and "Star Trek" franchises (of COURSE), Ursula K. Le Guin, Nnedi Okorafor's "Binti" series, and Nalo Hopkinson's body of work. Selisker also references Dan Sinykin's article "The Conglomerate Era: Publishing, Authorship, and Literary Form, 1965–2007" in the journal Contemporary Literature and Joseph Campbell and Darko Suvin's competing definitions of science fiction; to read more about these, just look for the Wikipedia page on "Definitions of Science Fiction."
Want to find out more about Scott Selisker? You can find his book "Human Programming" on Amazon, his faculty webpage at https://english.arizona.edu/users/scott-selisker, and his Twitter handle is @sselisker.
We do also want to give shout-outs here in the show-notes to our previous episodes on Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.'s "The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction":
Beauty #1: Fictive Neology (Episode 5)
Beauty #2: Novums (Episode 12)
Beauty #3: Future History (MIA, hard drive failure)
Beauty #4: Imaginary Science (Episode 34)
Beauty #5: The Sublime (Episode 55)
Beauty #6: The Grotesque (Episode 71)
Beauty #7: The Techno-Gatorade (Episode 79)
You can find all of our back episodes on YouTube once they have shuffled off these earthly coils of their SoundCloud first life.
Like our content or our new introduction? Our website is www.imaginaries.net, and you can drop us a line at [email protected] or find us on Twitter at @imaginary_pod. You can find ALL of our back episodes on YouTube, and listen to our episodes on iTunes or SoundCloud. If you would like to help support our work, you can do so at www.ko-fi.com/imaginaries.