Last spring, like everyone else, the rhythm of my day-to-day came to a grinding halt. With the swiftness of all historical cataclysm, what I thought I knew I suddenly didn’t, and what had previously worked was now woefully inadequate. I say “like everyone else,” because of the universalizing import of a pandemic. Whether one takes it seriously or not — and we have seen so many distinct and frustrating shades of disbelief already — it is there, shaping our world.
When the first wave hit I was in upstate New York, teaching a university-level literature class on James Baldwin — a class that, like the rest of our daily lives, took place in person. I had to scramble. My lectures were suddenly on Zoom, assignments were emailed and shared on various clouds, class discussion took on the stilted rhythm of a group still not-quite-acclimated to life on the screen. It all had the eerie foreboding of something out of science fiction.
Luckily, I was also working for Intelligentsia, where — because of my job upstate — I was already remote, familiarizing myself with the protocols of online learning. Here, I had a student who wanted to improve their writing and reading comprehension, and who, conveniently enough, had an abiding interest in science fiction. We were reading N.K. Jemison’s The Fifth Season, a novel about a world come undone by extreme and volatile climate. It’s unclear whether or not the world of The Fifth Season takes place in the future or in an alternate timeline, but there is enough recognizable about our world to hold onto. Of course, when you can hold onto something in a dystopia, you are in for trouble.
There was something satisfying, though, in those extreme times (and the times we are still headed for), about working on science fiction remotely. First, it was that my student — a bright and blindingly funny young person from Greenpoint — was excited by the book. It wasn’t their choice, but it was tailored to their needs. They felt as though the work was for them, it was something they could claim as their own. As an educator, I can tell you that that kind of engagement doesn’t come easy, and it feels like a gift when it appears. Because of this, we got to talk seriously about the book and the issues that it raises. Literary critic Fredric Jameson suggests that science fiction is a genre that expresses a desire for utopia — the place that does not (yet) exist — but conscripts us to imagine it nonetheless. It should not be surprising that science fiction is often turned to in the throws of global catastrophe.
So, what did I learn? Suddenly trapped in lockdown, away from my friends in the city, unable to get to my university office, each trip to the grocery store a seemingly high-stakes event? I learned again about literature and the desire for something better (something I never seem to tire of re-learning). And I learned this with that young person from Greenpoint, who themselves became a more confident writer, and a sharper interpreter of texts. We learned this in our own little science fiction scenario, faces on a screen. And in these times, that is the kind of work that gets done. The tools available to us are crude, but useful. Peering through the dystopia — the stress, fear, and anxiety — we read together and write together, in search of something better.
— Bob Ryan
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Author Bob Ryan is an expert in the fields of literature, cultural critique, history, and writing. He is set to receive his PhD from the University of Illinois-Chicago later this year and currently teaches at the college level in upstate New York.
