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© Ben Klug and Mark Sokolov
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Welcome to Starboard Vineyard Tours! Curious what people have thought and written about science fiction? Want some guidance on discovering this area of study - things to read, and ways to read them? In this podcast, Mark and Ben will take you on a tour through the world of science fiction studies. Join us on the beginning of a voyage into the unfamiliar, the estranging, the counterfactual, the speculative, what has not happened but might: science fiction, in all its forms. (And please remember to keep hands, feet, and any other limbs on board the vessel at all times!)
21 Episodes
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For this episode, we read Joseph D. Andriano's Immortal Monster: The Mythological Evolution of the Fantastic Beast in Modern Fiction and Film (1999). Andriano reads his primary texts - an eclectic collection, from Moby Dick to Jaws, King Kong to Grendel (1971) - as the great myth of the immortal monster, transformed over the decades and by different creators' hands. For him this myth speaks to our culture's deeply held beliefs about the boundaries of the human and the animal. We find ourselves perplexed and not especially convinced by this methodology. Still, these many monsters give us plenty to talk about, especially our old friend the white whale.Topics: monsters, mythology, animalsNext episode we will be reading Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (2016), by André M. Carrington.
This month's reading is upsettingly timely, as we read Jordan S. Carroll's Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (2024). Carroll covers both the historical uses of science fiction by the far right, and the current ways white nationalists imagine the future and read the genre. Topics include: fans being slans and the genre of the mutational romance; klan being fans and the "hermeneutics of obtuseness" they need to avoid recognizing anti-racist themes; science fictional mythologies of whiteness. It's an interesting topic, which Carroll discusses both accessibly and in detail, involving a wide variety of the worst people to read science fiction, and we try to keep discussion as light and as biting as mutually possible, given the above.Topics: whiteness, speculation, fandomContent warning for discussion of white supremacist ideology and neo-nazis, including discussion of racist claims about human nature, but not any extensive discussions of racist acts of violence.Next month's episode is currently uncertain! When we know what we're reading, we'll let you know.
This month, we read Kingsley Amis's provocatively titled New Maps of Hell (1960) - in which Amis sets forth a his account of the nature and hopes of science fiction at the end of what's often called the Golden Age. New Maps has been often referenced in works we've read so far, and ends up something of an eccentric snapshot of a moment in the genre, a commentary on the state of the genre through Amis's very particular concerns. These include the “comic inferno”, the power and danger of advertising, and the anti-conformist streak in SF, as well as an extended analogy between SF and jazz. Overall, it's an odd book, one that had us asking if Amis even really liked science fiction - or maybe whether he liked that he liked it or not.Topics: SF history, Golden Age, pulpNext episode, we will be reading Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (2024) by Jordan S. Carroll.
For this (belated - apologies!) episode, Mark is joined by guests Jackson and Nora of Anomalous Readings and other fine podcasts. We read John Moore's “Miracle Stalker: Personal and Social Transformation in Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic”, published in Foundation in fall 1997. The article starts out with some strong Freudian claims and then goes on to mostly talk about other stuff, leaving us a bit confused as to its ultimate argument. We're always happy to talk Roadside Picnic, though. It's a brief, but wide-ranging discussion on the novel's interest in class, family, and miracles.Topics: Roadside Picnic, Freudian analysisFind Jackson at headfallsoff.com on Bluesky, and on many podcasts on the Abnormal Mapping network.Find Nora at skulldaughter.bsky.social on Bluesky, and on many podcasts on the Export Audio network.Next month, we will cover New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction (1960), by Kingsley Amis.
For this episode, we read Pilgrims Through Space and Time: Trends and Patterns in Scientific and Utopian Fiction, J.O. Bailey's 1947 book about the emerging genre of “scientific fiction”: its history, its plots, and its value. Quite a bit of the first two, especially, as a large portion of the book is catalogue and summary, and frankly it was a bit of a slog, but it still holds great interest for us - Pilgrims is arguably the first work of scholarship on science fiction every published, at least academically. We consider the categories Bailey uses, the frustration of summary, and the limitations of catalogue, as well as what we can learn about the period's science fiction and its ethos. An ethos that, unfortunately, definitely also included eugenics.Topics: SF history, Victorian literature, pulpNext month: Ben will be taking December off to focus on dissertating and family, so Mark will be joined by Jackson and Nora of Anomalous Readings (and many other fine podcasts) to discuss John Moore's “Miracle Stalker: Personal and Social Transformation in Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic” (1997).
For this episode, we read Graham J. Murphy's article “Cyberpunk's masculinist legacy: Puppetry, labour and ménage à trois in Blade Runner 2049” published in Science Fiction Film and Television, in a symposium on the legacy of Blade Runner. This continues our string of articles, and gives us a chance to think about a movie we both enjoy and dynamics we both find fascinating. Murphy both interests and frustrates us, identifying some of the most interesting moments of gender and embodiment in the film, but leaving us wanting more analysis and discussion, so be prepared for a bunch of digressions about Blade Runner in general and in gender.Content warning: Though there’s nothing explicit, the discussion as a whole focuses on gendered violence.Topics: Gender, feminism, film, Blade Runner, cyberpunkNext month, we plan to read what might be the first historical study of science fiction as a genre, Pilgrims Through Space and Time by J. O. Bailey.
This episode we read an article on a mission: "Shadows of the Empire/A New Hope: A Dialectical Critique of Gender Historicization and Utopian Desire in Isabel Fall's “Helicopter Story”" by JD Fulloon, which is a mouthful, and was published in the May 2024 issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly. Fulloon's goal is to engage with "Helicopter Story" not for the controversies surrounding its publication and the backlash, but taking it seriously as a work of literature with something to say, a mission we're entirely on board with. In that spirit, while we do address the context, we focus on engaging with Fulloon's historicizing Marxist analysis of "Helicopter Story" as well as what we find interesting and exciting in the story itself, plus get into some confusion about what plastics are and what the story is doing with military science fiction - and what that Star Wars is doing in that title besides making it a bit longer.Topics: Gender, trans studies, military SF, MarxismNext month, we’re reading “Cyberpunk's masculinist legacy: Puppetry, labour and ménage à trois in Blade Runner 2049” by Graham J. Murphy.
For this episode, we read Gary Westfahl's The Mechanics of Wonder: The Creation of the Idea of Science Fiction (1998). This book frustrated us quite a bit with its insistence that the fundamental nature of science fiction was defined in the 20s and has not changed since. On the other hand, we came away with a new appreciation for its central figures, Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell, Jr., especially Gernsback, as thinkers of science fiction, if not theorists per se. The depth of Westfahl's research into these two men's writings fascinated us; we simply disagree strongly with his conclusions. The book presents itself as a challenge to the field of science fiction studies. We find ourselves in the position of answering that challenge.Topics: sf history, biographyNote: The original 1973 science fiction history by Brian Aldiss is actually called Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction, and the updated version from 1986 is Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction. Apologies for the error!Next time, we'll be looking at JD Fulloon’s “Shadows of the Empire/A New Hope: A Dialectical Critique of Gender Historicization and Utopian Desire in Isabel Fall’s ‘Helicopter Story’” (2024), this time for certain.
This episode, we read an article from the most recent issue of Science Fiction Studies, one that touches on topics near and dear to our hearts. With “Toward a Science-Fictional Interpretational Method: Reading Three Borges Stories” by Michael O'Krent, we get to engage both with science-fictional reading and the work of Jorge Luis Borges. O'Krent proposes a way to define science fiction around a Delany-derived practice of “reading for worlds”, then applies it to three classic Borges stories. In reading the article, we discuss Borges (of course), genre history, and articles that start with “toward a”. On the way we get into our respective childhood feelings on the finitude of possible human thought and experience, get a bit punchy, and talk about Tlön more than a little.Topics: Science-fictional reading, SFS, cognitive estrangementNext time, we'll be looking at JD Fulloon’s “Shadows of the Empire/A New Hope: A Dialectical Critique of Gender Historicization and Utopian Desire in Isabel Fall’s ‘Helicopter Story’” (2024).
This month, we read “The Working Planetologist: Speculative Worlds and the Practice of Climate Science” by Katherine Buse, which is the second chapter of Practices of Speculation: Modeling, Embodiment, Figuration (2020), an anthology collection of pieces on speculation. This article in particular is about Dune and its impact on climate science as a field, so we get into discussions of kangaroo rats, climate models, and what makes fiction “ecological” - with surprise conversation topic Delicious in Dungeon. Buse proposes that climate scientists are, in effect, big nerds, and being big nerds ourselves we find this fascinating, and find her account of the influence of science fiction and science fictional thinking on climatology compelling.Topics: Speculation, science and technology studies, ecology, fandomNext month, we’ll read Michael O’Krent’s “Toward a Science-Fictional Interpretational Method: Reading Three Borges Stories” (2024).
This month, we took a brief dip into a different medium with The World Is Born From Zero: Understanding Speculation and Video Games (2022), by Cameron Kunzelman, and got into the mechanics of speculation. This book crosses both science fiction studies and game studies, with a significant infusion of speculative materialism/realism, so there’s a number of new ideas to juggle as we talk over Kunzelman’s approach to science fiction video games. We discuss “speculation” as a philosophical category, and the way Kunzelman locates it in game mechanics, as well as his case studies in games like VA-11 Hall-A’s cyberpunk job training, The Last of Us’ use and misuse of speculation in perspectives, and the various models of climate-change strategy game. We also discuss pessimistic scholarship, grindset nazgûl, and how neither of us know that much about Metal Gear Solid. The book talk we mention in the episode can be found here.CONTENT WARNING: The third chapter of The World Is Born From Zero discusses anti-black violence and racism in The Last of Us’ narrative structure in detail, and so our discussion from 1:39:52 - 1:50:47. Topics: Speculation, speculative realism, cognitive estrangement, video gamesNote: we learned after recording the episode that A Hand With Many Fingers uses archival information about the Nugan Hand Bank scandal, which we did not know about at the time, and assumed based on its discussion in the book was fictional.Next episode's reading is TBD, so watch this space!
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, mimesisNext 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, utopiaNext 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, psychoanalysisCONTENT 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, UtopiaNext 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 EventNext 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 singularityNext 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'“.
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