This month we read the book with the best title in SF studies, Seo-Young Chu's Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation (2010), which was also formative in both of our trajectories in SF studies. We discuss Chu's approach to science fictional language as lyricism, the absence (or omnipresence?) of science fictional poetry, and consider how she recasts Suvin's core ideas into a totally new form. For Chu, science fiction isn't just a genre but a quality of language itself at a deep level, and so this episode is an extensive delve into not only her examples but the implications of her theory, how time travel is a trauma plot, whether cyberspace is real, how symptomatic reading works, and whether telepathy is chiasmus. We also get some extremely lush close reading. This isn't cognitive estrangement - it's estranged cognition.

Topics: Poetry, cognitive estrangement, estranged cognition, close reading, mimesis

Next month we'll be reading Cameron Kunzelman's The World is Born From Zero and make a first dip into talking about video games.

This month, we read Carl Freedman’s Critical Theory and Science Fiction (2000) and continue our journey through the Suvinian tradition. We discuss a lot of the first thing, critical theory, and a lot of the second thing, science fiction. We consider the connections he draws between various philosophers and critics on the one hand and various classics of SF, especially New Wave SF, ranging from Solaris to The Dispossessed to Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, on the other. On the gripping hand, we come to grips with Freedman’s argument that SF is, or at least should be, the privileged genre of critical theory, and SVT becomes a theory podcast for a hot minute. And also, we discuss the single page selection from this book that’s become Freedman’s most commonly cited idea (it’s in the introduction).

Topics: Cognition effect, cognitive estrangement, critical theory, utopia, dialectics.

Next month, we read the SF studies work with the best title of all time: Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation (2010) by Seo-Young Chu.

This month, we read John Rieder's Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, and talk a lot about Victorian SF and BHBMFFF (big-headed baby men from the far future). We talk through Rieder's way of reading the period's SF as inverting, rotating, and distorting the colonial perspective from within the colonial perspective, and discuss a lot of weird old SF stories that he touches on in the book. We delve the sordid, princess-ful depths of the Lost Race narrative, discuss Jack London too much, talk about those BHBMFFs, and witness Europe get blown up a few times across the various chapters. We also talk a bit about what kind of analysis we each like, and how much Rieder has it out for Suvin.

Topics: colonialism, racism, Victorian literature, utopia

Next month we’re taking a New Year’s break, so the next episode will be out in February 2024, for which we will read Critical Theory and Science Fiction by Carl Freedman.

In this episode, join us as we read a selection of short pieces on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and discuss that epochal novel's place in science fiction and in discourse - only one of our four pieces is strictly a work of science fiction studies, but all four help us grapple with the discussion around Frankenstein and how attitudes towards the novel have changed. Join us and get mad at outdated scholarship, think about the change in reception SF and Shelley have seen, and hear our own strongly held opinions about The Modern Prometheus. The four pieces are:

“Horror’s Twin: Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Eve”, chapter 7 of The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979)

“Mary Shelley's Monster: Politics and Psyche in Frankenstein”, Lee Sterrenburg, collected in The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, ed. George Levine and U.C. Knoepflmacher (1979)

“My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage”, Susan Stryker (1994)

“The Frankenstein Barrier”, George Slusser, collected in Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative, ed. George Slusser and Tom Shippey (1992)

Topics: Feminism, transfeminism, Romanticism, speculation, biography, psychoanalysis

CONTENT WARNING: "My Words to Victor Frankenstein" contains mention of a trans woman's suicide, which we discuss briefly between 1:21:26 - 1:22:02, and again 1:28:35 - 1:29:52.

Next episode, we read Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (2008), by John Rieder.

Also, Ben continues to have released Detect Or Die, a tabletop RPG of neo-noir empiricism, unstable detectives, and total ego death & resurrection. Heavily inspired by Disco Elysium and designed after Bluebeard’s Bride, you can find it here!

This month, we continue reading Darko Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction - On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (1979). In this second half, History, it’s safe to say Ben and Mark find a lot more to disagree with than in the first half – not unlike many other SF scholars before us. Suvin’s long history of SF presents the genre as a transhistorical literature, something that emerges in different forms again and again, which can be both exciting and frustrating. We discuss the literary tradition of the Utopia, travel narratives of the bizarre and fantastic, Suvin’s bad opinions about Frankenstein, and more. Find out what it means to have an “alternative island”, and who Suvin calls the Master of Space and the Master of Time, and what those have to do with 19th century capitalism! The Suvin Event has happened, and he intends it to color everything that came before.

Topics: Cognition, Estrangement, the Novum, the Suvin Event, SF history, Utopia

Next time, we read a series of essays about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and talk a lot about Milton, gender, and monsters. The essays are:

“Horror’s Twin: Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Eve”, chapter 7 of The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979)

“Mary Shelley's Monster: Politics and Psyche in Frankenstein”, Lee Sterrenburg, collected in The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, ed. George Levine and U.C. Knoepflmacher (1979)

“My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage”, Susan Stryker (1994)

“The Frankenstein Barrier”, George Slusser, collected in Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative, ed. George Slusser and Tom Shippey (1992)

Also, Ben continues to have released Detect Or Die, a tabletop RPG of neo-noir empiricism, unstable detectives, and total ego death & resurrection. Heavily inspired by Disco Elysium and designed after Bluebeard’s Bride, you can find it here!

This month, we’re exploring one of the founding texts of Science Fiction studies - Darko Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction - On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (1979), available on the Internet Archive. In the first half of the book, Poetics, Suvin lays out his full theory of cognitive estrangement as the nature of SF and his own particular goals and hopes for the genre, and it’s that first half we discuss in this episode. We find ourselves pretty sympathetic to Suvin’s stringent approach and goals, as well as enjoying his sometimes bizarre choice of words and extremely fun metaphors. This one’s fundamental to both of our approaches to SF - so come find out why this book is sometimes called “the Suvin Event.”

Topics: Cognition, Estrangement, the Novum, the Suvin Event

Next month, we’ll continue Suvin with his History, the second half of the book, where he extends the history of SF back towards the very literal dawn of human civilization.

Also, Ben recently released probably the only TTRPG to ever quote Darko Suvin: Detect Or Die, a game inspired by Disco Elysium and Bluebeard’s Bride. Check it out here!

A quick update about Detect or Die, a new TTRPG Ben wrote and Mark edited, that’s going to be available on Ben’s Itch Page HERE, and then the project page HERE starting August 25th! Also, if you are interested, August 25th is Itch.io Creator Day, so Ben would certainly appreciate first-day downloads! There’s an example of play HERE, and in this audio update, Ben explains how SF studies influenced his design for a Disco Elysium inspired amnesiac detective tabletop role-playing game. 

Ben will also be posting on Twitter and Bluesky - both @silkandstone - with more information about the game and its design this Thursday and Friday.  

Thanks for listening! 

P.S. There’s a quotation from Darko Suvin in Detect or Die, so it even connects directly to our upcoming episode - Ben

This episode, we’re going to delve into the nonfiction writings of Joanna Russ, one of the major writers and critics of the New Wave of science fiction. She’s best known for The Female Man (1975) - a striking novel that we’ve both been meaning to read, we swear. The collection To Write Like A Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction (1995) covers a lot of ground, so we’ve selected a set of essays to focus on, giving particular attention to “Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction,” “Speculations: The Subjunctivity of Science Fiction,” “What Can a Heroine Do? Or Why Women Can’t Write,” “Recent Feminist Utopias,” and “On ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” The essays cover a wide swathe of her career as a critic, so we both bemoan how some of the things Russ points out haven’t changed, and ponder some of the genres and ideas she highlights that have fallen out of fashion. Since this is a collection covering decades of writing, we get a chance to see both her lasting methodology and interests, and some of the ways her priorities and opinions changed over time.

Topics: Subjunctivity, utopia, feminism, the Gothic, academic criticism, and many more.

Next month, we read the first section (Poetics) of Darko Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (1979) - possibly the most influential text in science fiction studies. You can find it on the Internet Archive.

We try to encapsulate all of The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., puts forward a collection of seven broad ideas for the discussion of science fiction, producing a rich survey of the genre and a very clear structure for this episode. While the Seven Beauties does not set out to present a single overarching theory of SF, we discuss the implicit throughline of play and playfulness that Csicsery-Ronay identifies, a ludic quality of SF that we at least have a lot of fun with. We also discuss which of the seven beauties we personally find most compelling, which leave us cold, and the relationships we can see between the beauties and the theorists of SF that Csicsery-Ronay is building on to frame them.

Topics: fictive neology; the novum; future history; imaginary science; the science-fictional sublime; the science-fictional grotesque; the Technologiade; space opera; the singularity

Next month, we will read a selection of essays by Joanna Russ collected in her book To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction: “Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction”; “Speculations: The Subjunctivity of Science Fiction”; “What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can't Write”; “Recent Feminist Utopias”; and “On 'The Yellow Wallpaper'“.

In our inaugural episode, we read "About 5,750 Words," Samuel R. Delany's classic essay on the language of science fiction. Delany theorizes the experience of reading, seeing each work of fiction as a sequence of word-images, each changing and correcting the reader's mental picture of what they have already read. (These pictures even include Delany's vision of "the", an alien creature we discuss in detail.) Science fiction, then, is a particular "subjunctivity" of language, a way that science fictional language cues us to read. It's safe to say neither of us would think about science fiction the way we do today without this essay, so it was a pleasure for both of us to get into detail on Delany's ideas. I hope you join us, for this and future episodes!

Topics: word by word corrections, subjunctivity, science fictional reading

This essay is collected in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, 2009 edition (let us know if you're having trouble finding it in your library). The 2020 Windham-Campbell Lecture Delany gave (which we mention in the episode) can be found here.