Why Do You Read This Crazy Stuff?

[sleigh]

I'm teaching a Lit class looking at SF & Fantasy. How would you explain to those students (most of whom don't actually seem to read the genre) why you read this weird stuff? What is it about sf&f that you love? (Warning: I'm likely to relay your answers to the class -- anonymously, of course!)

Comments

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

I like SF/F because it tends to do two particular things I enjoy:

1. Teach me about some other place. Yeah, the place is fictional, but still, the whole intellectual exercise of seeing how things are done elsewhere is neat, and since the characters are, if not human, at least relatable-by-humans, then their thoughts about their world are in some way relevant to ways humans might think about their world.

Shorter answer: SF/F demonstrates that one's local space (family, neighborhood, city, country) does not have a lock on "this is how things are done." Once you open to the notion that other people in other places may do things in different ways and that's fine, that's very powerful.

2. Semi-related: SF/F can address issues that exist in the real world without getting bogged down in real-world clutter. It becomes a thought-experiment. The fiction sets control-limits on certain variables and then looks at how things change. Depending on how well the thought-experiment is done, it gives new insights in how our world works.

SF does this through "what if" and sometimes metaphor; Fantasy does this mostly through metaphor.

Another advantage of doing this thought-experiment in SF/F (instead of "realistic" fiction) is that you can offload the baggage of the subject being too close. Want to talk about the effects of war on young soldiers and their relations back home? You can set the story in Vietnam, or you can write The Forever War.

Had TFW been set in Vietnam, (a) it would have been too close to home for some people to be able to look at the points without getting emotionally distracted, (b) it would not be considered as apt years later, despite the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq/Afghanistan, and (c) certain issues were pushed beyond the bounds of reality (the relativistic time-shifts) which highlighted the points of the story even more.

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

Good example with Joe's Forever War. The "thought experiment" idea is what I like about the genre(s).

[maiac.livejournal.com]

Yes, all of this. Good explanation!