Maya Costales: "Dear Bridget Smith: Why the Classics are Valuable to Me"

Dear Bridget Smith: Why the Classics are Valuable to Me

By

Maya Costales

                My first experience with classic science fiction was reading Dangerous Visions, the anthology of transgressive fiction released in the 1967. This anthology was what compelled me to seek out older works of science fiction. The stories I read in Dangerous Visions gave me a good idea of what would interest me. One I remember vividly is “The Jigsaw Man”, a story wherein a man is hunted down for committing a capital offense in order to have his organs donated. At the end of the story his crime is revealed: he had multiple traffic violations. Another story “The Malley System” had prisoners tortured as they are forced to live through the memory of their crime every single day. These stories gave me insight into how the science innovations of today were viewed when they first came to be. Science fiction of the past can give us an idea of the social climate around certain issues when they were written.

            Social commentary is something I greatly value in science fiction, and I think that classical works can give us a solid base from which to work. For example, Neal Shusterman’s Unwind series features the titular process where undesirable children above the age of thirteen and younger than eighteen can be ‘unwound’ and reduced to their body parts. This process came about as a compromise between having abortion be legal or illegal. One of the main protagonists, Risa, is a ward of the state and must be Unwound because of budget cuts to state funding. Another protagonist, Connor, is a troublemaker and delinquent whose mother and stepfather have him unwound for being inconvenient. This premise is very similar to “The Jigsaw Man” as minor offences can result in forced organ donation, however Unwind deals more with the inner lives of the characters. Science fiction stories of the past can give us a broader context with which to read stories now. There are plenty of sf stories that could be described as dystopian and which deal with themes of bodily autonomy and these works show us how science fiction has evolved over time.

            There are some unsavory aspects of classical science fiction that make it less enjoyable to read than more recent stories, which do not contain these elements. For this reason I do not place classical science fiction stories over ones that have come out recently. While I think that there is a lot to learn from classical sf I do not think that it is inherently superior to modern sf.  H. P. Lovecraft, a notable science fiction horror writer, was virulently racist and anti-black and used non-white people to create an element of unease within his stories. In his short story “Medusa’s Coil” a woman uses her sentient hair to strangle a former plantation owner after marrying him. The narrator, after discovering her mixed-race parentage, states “[. . .] I felt that the de Russys, with their proudly cherished honour and high, sensitive spirits, would not wish me to say more. They had borne enough, God knows, without the countryside guessing what a daemon of the pit—what a gorgon of the elder blasphemies—had come to flaunt their ancient and stainless name.” This attitude is most notable in “Medusa’s Coil”, however it pervades Lovecraft’s other works. His short story “The Street” is filled with anti-immigrant sentiment and though the Russian immigrants in the story are not linked to supernatural phenomena, they are presented as menacing terrorists.

Lovecraft is just one of the classical sf writers whose work includes problematic material which may detract from the overall story. I think that we can learn a lot from classical science fiction with regards to cultural context and that they provide a good foundation for understanding later works.