The Murray State News

Issue date: 11/18/05 Section: Opinion

Amy Wolford

For someone who loves science fiction and fantasy, there is really nothing at Murray State to take. The only real class is the Literature Masterpiece: Fantasy, Myth, and Legend class. This class is really only for the fantasy part of me. Where are the science fiction classes?

It's often said science fiction is the literature of change. When a culture is undergoing a lot of changes because of scientific advances and technological developments, it's hardly surprising when stories about these changes become popular.

(Note the changes may be in our ability to control the world, or just in our understanding of it.) For example, some "post-holocaust" stories, such as Wyndham's "The Chrysalids" (also known as "Rebirth"), portray cultures that understand and control less of the world than we do.

Other stories offer future technologies that we can hope are based on present-day science, but have not developed yet, such as fusion-powered spaceships. Yet others go beyond this to dazzle us with future science that differs from what is now believed, but they retain some recognizable elements of the world we live in, so we can at least believe that the world depicted in the story might some day come to be.

If science fiction is the literature of change, then fantasy is the literature of longing: instead of writing about the world as it might some day become, it is about the world as we wish it could be or have been. In support of this, I point to the many fantasy works in which undistinguished protagonists turn out to have special and valuable powers, and to the many more in which the boundary between good and evil is so sharp you can cut yourself on it.

I believe the reason we do not have a science fiction class is because many people cannot understand the science fiction text.

Frequently, these are very sophisticated readers of literary works. Many times when they try to read these books, they go sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase. When you read a science fiction text in this way with such readers it becomes clear their difficulty is almost entirely in their failure to create the alternate world that gives the story's incidents all their sense.

While these readers have no trouble imagining a Balzac provincial printing office, a Dickens boarding school or a Jane Austen sitting room, the most ordinary contemporary science fiction writer absolutely baffles them.

Science fiction should be taken as serious as any of the brilliant works by Dickens, Austen or Chaucer. It may be a different type of genre, but it is still important for students to learn about it.

Amy Wolford is a Creative Writing major from Murray.

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