#70 = Volume 23, Part 3 = November 1996
Darren Harris-Fain
Farewell to the Master: Standing in for Tom Clareson, Spring 1993
As a young assistant professor, I count myself lucky in today's academic job market that I've had the opportunity to teach science fiction at least once. Although the unusual circumstances of the situation made for an interesting and probably unique experience, I learned a great deal about the subject and how to teach it and would do many of the same things over again should I have the chance to teach it again.
One Thursday evening only a few days into 1993, I received a telephone call from Joanne Frye, chair of the Department of English at the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio. Thomas D. Clareson had suddenly taken ill and was unable to teach his class on science fiction, she said. She then asked if I would be willing and able to fill in at the last minute.
It might as well have been a rhetorical question. The previous May I had completed my Ph.D. at Kent State University and was experiencing the same job-market hell that hundreds of other new Ph.D.s across North America were experiencing at the time. In the meantime, I was teaching part time at Kent and working as a freelance copy editor for a university press. In my graduate studies I had concentrated on late nineteenth-century and twentieth-century British and American literature; I had also spent as much time as I could studying science fiction. I read voraciously, wrote reviews and an article for Extrapolation, convinced the graduate studies committee at Kent to allow me to pursue independent investigations on British and American science fiction and to permit one of my minor areas for my doctoral exams to be on science fiction, and wrote a master's thesis on politics in the work of Harlan Ellison and a dissertation on the changing literary reputation of H. G. Wells. I was able, I thought, and more than willing to teach science fiction at Wooster—and what an honor to fill in for Tom Clareson, founder of Extrapolation and one of the seminal figures in the academic study of science fiction!
The next day, Friday, I drove from Kent, where I was then living, to Wooster, interviewed for the position, and was offered the job late that afternoon. Classes started the following Monday, when I began making the first of dozens of hour-long one-way commutes to Wooster three times a week in the dead of winter (despite it being the euphemistically named Spring Semester) in northeast Ohio.
Over the weekend before the first week of classes, I prepared as much as I could in such a short period. Tom already had his reading list, of course, and most of the books were in the bookstore; and while I had not read some of the titles, I decided to do things the easy way and keep his list. It comprised nine novels (see Appendix), the first of which was published in 1951. I quickly decided to cover the novels in chronological order—one of the strategies recommended by Dennis M. Kratz in his chapter on teaching science fiction in the latest edition of Anatomy of Wonder (717)—and devote the first week and a half of the semester to discussions of what science fiction is and historical background. (I later learned that this strategy is recommended in the Teacher's Guide to Accompany The Norton Book of Science Fiction by Brian Attebery, who says, "Any classroom approach...will be most fruitful if it includes at least some attention, first, to the origins of SF...." [2]) This would give me time, I reasoned, to write a syllabus and get started on reading or rereading the novels. What I didn't know off the top of my head I could draw from the papers I had written for my independent investigations at Kent.
During the first class session I handed out index cards and asked students to tell me a little about themselves—major, year, previous background in science fiction—and then we brainstormed on the board about what they thought of when they thought of science fiction. This then led to an attempt to define science fiction that included Attebery's second recommendation, to look at science fiction through "its relationship to the academy and the marketplace" (2). Both exercises were instructive. First, I began to get a sense of the diversity of my students, who ranged from sophomores to seniors, from English majors to science majors and everything in between, and from long-time fans to neophytes.1 As I learned more about them over the semester I also found an interesting diversity in students' exposure to science fiction. Attebery divides students into two camps, English majors comfortable with "traditional" literature but for whom science fiction may be a different world and fans who "know more about science fiction than you do" and who have read "several hundred SF novels, subscribe to two or three fiction magazines, and regularly attend local and national conventions" (1). What Attebery says about English majors, from my experience with this class, is fairly accurate. However, I experienced three types of fans and myself constituted a fourth type. One type, consisting of only two of three students out of thirty in my class, were as Attebery described: avid readers as well as fans of science-fiction film and television, they were extremely knowledgeable and had read many things I had not. Most of the students who classified themselves as fans, though, would not fit Attebery's description at all. While they enjoyed reading science fiction (along with fantasy fiction and horror), they had not read as widely as the "true" fans; their tastes were for the most part limited to extremely popular authors such as Piers Anthony, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Stephen King, with maybe some Ursula K. Le Guin thrown in, in addition to some L. Ron Hubbard and Star Trek novels; and magazine science fiction and fandom were alien worlds for them.2 A handful, the third type I recognized, were interested primarily in such writers as William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, and cyberpunk authors; one owned a copy of Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction (1992), edited by Larry McCaffery.
Then there was me. Few of my students had read much published before the 1980s, including the die-hard fans; when I polled the class, almost no one had read any Wells, Heinlein before Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), Alfred Bester, Ray Bradbury, Olaf Stapledon, or anything else that I would consider "classic" science fiction. Even the New Wave was a long time ago for them.3 In contrast, much of my academic training in science fiction was devoted to reading widely in its history. In that respect I suppose I am like most people who teach science fiction, who find that a large part of our job is to inform students that there is a vast body of work written before they began reading science fiction. If I ever have the opportunity to teach science fiction again I plan to bring in John Clute and Peter Nicholls's 1,370-page Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993) and drop in on the desk as a physical demonstration of the scope and volume of science fiction.
The brainstorming exercise was also helpful in getting a handle on what my students thought about science fiction. Many thought of it in terms of media, which of course is how most people in the Western world are acquainted with science fiction. Class discussion was active over whether novels such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), or George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) were science fiction, with debate focusing on whether content or context determined if a work is science fiction. Since few students possessed much historical knowledge of the genre, this provided only an opening exercise rather than a definition we could all be happy with, and we continued to discuss science-fiction themes and tropes throughout the semester.
Next, while I was preparing my syllabus and my notes on the first of the novels outside of class, I gave my students some of this much-needed historical background. I also placed Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (1986), by Brian W. Aldiss with David Wingrove, on reserve for anyone wanting more information. For assignments, I settled upon some standard ones for a literature course (reading quizzes, essay exams for the midterm and final, term paper) along with others designed specifically for the course. Tom had chosen novels for the reading list, which was fine, but a great deal of science fiction for much of its history has been dominated by short stories, so I felt the students should get some exposure to this side of the field. I also did not want to neglect the importance of the media in shaping public perceptions of science fiction. My solution was to have students write three two-to-three-page reports on science fiction other than novels, one of which could be on science fiction in television or the movies—an option almost everyone exercised. The library at the College of Wooster, thanks to Tom, had a substantial collection of science-fiction anthologies and some periodicals, both magazines and academic journals—including a complete run, of course, of Extrapolation—as well as a film library with a few science-fiction titles. Such reports, I found, widened students' understanding of what was out there in the "huge and nebulous field of science fiction," to quote from my syllabus. (I was a bad punster then.) I also broadened this effect by having students present one of their three reports to the class.
In addition, I made arrangements to meet with Tom at his home in Wooster. Despite being connected to an oxygen tank and experiencing shortness of breath periodically, he was just as he was when I'd first met him at the 1989 Science Fiction Research Association conference in Oxford, Ohio: personable and eager to talk about science fiction. We discussed books and authors, teaching and scholarship, in the two times we met during the semester. His death a few months after the end of the quarter was a great loss.
Most of the course was occupied by class discussion of the nine novels Tom had ordered and the students had purchased, and which I scrambled to read or reread while spending six to seven hours a week on the road depending on weather conditions, teaching two different classes at Kent State, and conducting a job search for a full-time position. In retrospect, though all the books except S. M. Stirling's disturbing Marching through Georgia (1988) were popular with most of the students most of the time, I would have taught only the first books on the given reading list and ordered books I had read recently, because trying to stay on top of the reading under these circumstances was a battle I began to lose toward the end of the semester, and I feel I cheated my students. The historical and literary background at the beginning of the term and in between novels, I hope, was helpful, but I could have been better prepared for discussions of the later novels themselves. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the class immensely. Being able to teach science fiction, and so early in my career, was a dream come true. The students were bright and interesting, and it was not difficult to foster class discussion about the material.
I was also excited about another aspect of the situation: the fact that Tom, even before his illness, was planning to retire at the end of the semester. I hoped that the College of Wooster would want another science-fiction scholar to fill his place, if not the daunting task of filling his shoes, and I hoped I was in the right place at the right time. For whatever reasons, however, the college decided not to or was unable to fill the vacancy, in science fiction or in any other area. By necessity, I kept a close eye on position listings after that, and to the best of my knowledge the College of Wooster has yet to hire anyone to teach science fiction; and since they hired me because no one else there felt able to step in for Tom, it's unlikely that someone already there is teaching the subject. This would be a shame, considering the solid foundation Tom built there.
Few colleges and universities, in fact, have advertised for people able to teach science fiction, even in conjunction with other subjects, since I began scanning The Chronicle of Higher Education and the MLA Job Information List in 1991. Kratz convincingly makes a case for the teaching of science fiction in Anatomy of Wonder, but he also correctly points out that science fiction "remains undeniably a minor and marginal part of the school and university curriculum. Many academics still regard SF as a lesser, even subliterary form of genre fiction. One troubling development in particular illustrates this marginal existence: the shrinking budgets of the past decade have led to a decline in the number of science fiction courses being offered in both secondary and higher education" (715–16). After I left Wooster and Kent, I worked for two years as a reference-book editor, teaching composition part- time for one year. I would have been happy to teach anything, but especially science fiction, but the jobs were and still are few.
Still, I don't regret my experience of stepping in for Tom at the last minute and making up the course as I went along. I learned a great deal about teaching, about science fiction, and about teaching science fiction in the process, both from my classroom experiences and from the Master. I hope I have more opportunities to teach science fiction, which seems increasingly promising in an academic environment returning, after an intense interest in literary theory and in literatures of marginalized groups, to popular culture as an area of study and instruction. As Jean-Luc Picard would say, "Make it so."
NOTES
1. As for other types of diversity: out of thirty students, only five were women, unusual for a literature class but reflective of male predominance in science fiction. The class included one African-American student, one Asian-American student, one Indian-American student, and one student from England; the rest were white Americans. None were non-traditional in age.
2. In his "President's Message" in the November/December 1995 SFRA Review, Joe Sanders comments upon the aging of the science-fiction audience and the need for "entry-level" science fiction for readers for whom not even Piers Anthony is a familiar name (5).
3. In an interview in the November 1995 Locus, Samuel R. Delany notes that his science-fiction students are typically more enthusiastic about contemporary works than about older works (82). This may be because such students find contemporary works more relevant to their experience, since Delany also notes that "most of the students are what I think most of us would call culturally deprived" (5)—giving him blank looks, for instance, when he would mention artists such as Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse.
WORKS CITED
Attebery, Brian. Teacher's Guide to Accompany The Norton Book of Science Fiction. New York: Norton, 1993.
Kratz, Dennis M. "Teaching Science Fiction." Anatomy of Wonder: A Critical Guide to Science Fiction. 4th ed. Ed. Neil Barron. New Providence, NJ: Bowker, 1995. 715–37.
"Samuel R. Delany: Teaching and Writing." Locus 418: 4–5, 82, 84, November 1995.
Sanders, Joe. "President's Message." SFRA Review 220: 5–6, November/December 1995.
APPENDIX: COURSE DESCRIPTION
English 240. Science Fiction. This course is an introduction to the huge and nebulous field of science fiction. Through the reading of selected texts and class discussion, we shall explore what science fiction is, the literary and cultural contexts in which it has appeared, and how it is similar to and different from other types of writing. TEXTS: Simak, City; Heinlein, The Star Beast; Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Pohl, Gateway; Brin, The Postman; Bujold, Falling Free; Stirling, Marching through Georgia.
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