The Clarion Workshop at UCSD

Pardon me for coming late to this party, but an April 14 Washington Post opinion piece that continues to be reprinted in other papers is worth checking out.  It’s “The Future Is Now,” by Joel Achenbach, about the speed at which technological change is reshaping our lives:

Science and technology form a two-headed, unstoppable change agent. Problem is, most of us are mystified and intimidated by such things as biotechnology, or nanotechnology, or the various other -ologies that seem to be threatening to merge into a single unspeakable and incomprehensible thing called biotechnonanogenomicology. We vaguely understand that this stuff is changing our lives, but we feel as though it’s all out of our control. We’re just hanging on tight, like Kirk and Spock when the Enterprise starts vibrating at Warp 8.

Things are moving so far, so fast that it’s well nigh impossible to keep up.  The solution proposed by Christine Peterson of the Foresight Nanotech Institute: “Read science fiction.”

Science is becoming ever more specialized; technology is increasingly a series of black boxes, impenetrable to but a few. Americans’ poor science literacy means that science and technology exist in a walled garden, a geek ghetto. We are a technocracy in which most of us don’t really understand what’s happening around us. We stagger through a world of technological and medical miracles. We’re zombified by progress.

Peterson has one recommendation: Read science fiction, especially “hard science fiction” that sticks rigorously to the scientifically possible. “If you look out into the long-term future and what you see looks like science fiction, it might be wrong,” she says. “But if it doesn’t look like science fiction, it’s definitely wrong.”

We have folks looking seriously at the technological literacy problem, which can partially be dealt with by reforming science education so that it’s more relevant to broader audiences — not by dumbing it down, but rather by broadening the focus in Biology, for example, beyond just the training of future doctors and biology teachers to include teaching of relevance to future biotech employees, future informed citizens, etc. 

Achenbach’s piece is quite good; the online discussion afterward is less interesting, but still worth reading.

Earlier this week, the Second Life-focused blog Not Possible IRL had an interesting post on UCSD’s Sheldon Brown, Director of our Center for Research in Computing and the Arts, and his ongoing project, the Scalable City.  The post, “Using game technology to explore the “unreality” of virtual landscapes,” includes a link to the trailer on Youtube for Sheldon’s project.

Scalable City - a project by Sheldon Brown and Experimental Game Lab - creates environments, from urban to rural, via a data visualization pipeline.

Now Scalable City has opened at one of my favorite museums in the whole wide world, The Exploratorium in San Francisco. As you move through the interactive exhibit, you literally “paint” the flying landscape with highways, buildings, and automobiles. According to Sheldon’s website, “Each step in this pipeline builds upon the previous, amplifying exaggerations, artifacts and the patterns of algorithmic process. The results of this are experiences such as prints, video installations and interactive multi-user games and virtual environments.”

Sheldon tells me that when he describes the project, the light bulb that goes off in people’s heads often displays itself in the form of comments like, “Oh, you mean like Second Life!”  In real life (pun intended), his project is a way of looking at second, third and fourth generations of the technologies that enable Second Life, in the near-term future when virtual reality worlds will be far more extensive, adaptable and available.  The next one in the pipeline appears to be Avatar Reality’s serendipitously named Blue Mars, blogged here and here this past February after being previewed at GDC 2008.

Last year’s Clarion class met with Sheldon one afternoon, in a first experiment at lab tours and conversations with faculty designed to develop relationships and see if anything interesting emerges.  This year, we’re regularizing the program a little more, setting such discussions for Friday afternoons between 3:30 and 5:00, one of the very few times during the Clarion Workshop that could be called “down time.” 

Today’s PopMatters has a post by Mae-lee Chai on Adilifu Nama’s Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film, on the slim presence of blacks in the genre:

How one quarter of the Earth’s population suddenly disappears in the future is not an issue generally addressed in any of these films. How then, does one write a book about black people in a genre that for the most part has deliberately excluded them? The answer: by examining the erasure as well as the limited depictions of black people in science fiction.

The review begins with an anecdote that Nama’s friends, upon learning of his planned study, would tell him it was “going to be a short book.”  According to Chai, however, the depth that the book covers — and what it leaves out, including the treatment of black women, other races, children — indicates that Nama’s volume is only a starting point on a long journey to reconsider race and science fiction.  Octavia Butler once described one of her novels as follows:

I talked to members of my family, and did some personal research that didn’t really have anything to do with the time and place I was writing about, but that gave me a feeling of the experience of being black in a time and place where it was very difficult to be black.

Nama’s work implies that most filmmakers in sf and fantasy have focused on imagining ‘the experience of their (white) world’ in a different time and place without noticing who they were leaving out.  Then again, the relatively smaller numbers of prominent black filmmakers, let alone sf and fantasy filmmakers, begs the question of what one would expect to come first, the filmmakers or the films.

This summer’s Clarion workshop presents an interesting opportunity to discuss issues of race in literature.  We’re hoping to bring Nalo Hopkinson together with some of our Literature Department faculty specializing in African diaspora literature — like Fatima El-Tayeb, Camille Forbes, Dennis Childs or Sara Johnson – together with Clarion students for a conversation.  Just another way we hope that the Clarion workshop’s new UC San Diego home can serve as a resource to the students and broaden the community dialogue.

One of UC San Diego’s most interesting faculty members is Teddy Cruz, a Visual Arts professor specializing in urban architecture who is rethinking the very nature of the urban environment.  For writers thinking about imagined worlds, Teddy’s an exemplar of the ways that reimagining our current society can make for a better future.

Teddy – whose work can best be understood in its political context, as in his Political Equator II project – was the subject of a New York Times Magazine profile a couple of years back, and his work in Hudson, NY, the subject of a more recent article in that paper.  Last week’s issue of San Diego CityBeat described some of Teddy’s work in an article on the future of Barrio Logan, an inner-city neighborhood of San Diego facing much-needed redevelopment:

“It’s about complexity,” he said. “This is an opportunity to think of incubator spaces, to rethink the street itself, how it is appropriated by informal economies, farmers markets. There is a series of histories in these neighborhoods, how the structure is used, how community-based agencies are active in producing social culture.”

Cruz has garnered an international reputation for his work implementing this idea, which he refers to as “pixelation.” Much as a computer image comprises many dots of different colors, a neighborhood comprises many small structures that form a coherent whole. In urban planning terms, that means avoiding exactly the types of projects already underway in Barrio Logan, be they affordable housing or luxury apartments. Three years ago, Cruz persuaded some of his architect friends to purchase nine lots south of the Coronado Bridge in Barrio Logan. The plan was to create a new kind of community-based urban architecture.

“For me it’s been very compelling to imagine that housing or density can be evaluated as the amount of social exchanges per acre,” he said.

Teddy, recently added to the board of the Center City Development Corporation by San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders, further explains the concept of pixelation in a recent interview with online news source Voice of San Diego.  Teddy’s firm, estudio teddy cruz and its projects like Mi Pueblo — in collaboration with the community development organization Casa Familiar – presents a major opportunity to rethink the ongoing redensification of America’s cities.

Thanks to Cory Doctorow for picking up on this Wired interview with Jeff and Ann VanderMeer about the New Weird, about parenting, and about their current work.  Jeff’s description of how he sees SF and fantasy as part of the literary mainstream nicely summarizes the rationale for our Literature Department wanting the Clarion Workshop to be housed on our campus:

I’m always mixing up science and fantasy, whether it’s mushroom tech or, as in The Situation, strange biotech. I’m writing more and more about the contemporary workplace, too.

I think the main thing is, we always approach our projects not from a genre or non-genre stance, but from a kind of where-does-this-fit-in-in-culture generally. We always have a very keen awareness of popular culture, along with high culture, low culture, noir. So our anthos have focus, but also that kind of “mix”. I mean, some of them, like City of Saints and Madmen, mix fiction/nonfiction forms, and add in tons of graphics–not quite a graphic novel, but… The main thing is, the internet and the way memes move now, there is no monolithic thing called “genre” or “literary mainstream” any more. There’s all of this fascinating cross-pollinations and collaborations that you never really saw before. I think that kind of stuff interests GeekDad readers. I think I like to write stuff that can connect with different kinds of readers in different ways. Like, a fantasy reader is going to perceive The Situation one way, whereas somebody who works in front of a computer all day but doesn’t read fantasy is going to take something else out of it, for example.

Keep an eye out, by the way, for news on another upcoming anthology out of the VanderMeer empire, The Leonardo Variations.  It’s of, for and by Clarion students, a charity effort supporting the Workshop.  Very exciting stuff.

It was just a couple of days ago that I mentioned the link between science fiction and science.  Now Newsweek has an interview with a UCSD Scripps Institution of Oceanography scientist about his research on California’s Lake Mead that includes the following:

It may sound like the plot of an apocalyptic sci-fi flick, but Tim Barnett, a research marine geophysicist and climate expert at Scripps, says there’s a 50 percent chance that the manmade lake, a reservoir created by Hoover Dam located on the Colorado River 30 miles southeast of Las Vegas, will be dry by 2021, or even sooner if climate changes continue as expected and water use is not curtailed.

This just a couple of weeks after Time had an article about the rash of apocalype movies hitting the market, “Apocalypse New,” including the following from Cloverfield’s J.J. Abrams:

One of the cultural aftershocks of the bombing of Hiroshima was the awakening of Godzilla and the Japanese monster movie as a way of reckoning with the nightmare of U.S. atomic weapons. “Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears,” says J.J. Abrams, creator of Felicity, Alias and Lost and producer of Cloverfield. “When Godzilla came out, the idea of doing a movie about the destruction of a city because of a radioactive man-made thing must have had a similar feeling. On the one hand, it’s a silly man in a rubber suit. On the other hand, it’s a way to process these fears that are mostly bottled up.”

Our real-world tools are enough any more in our search for either meaning, or predictability.  Science fiction works so much better. 

UC San Diego has had the good fortune to have seven major figures in sf, fantasy and horror attend the University.  One of those was Suzette Haden Elgin, founder of the Science Fiction Poetry Association and a 1971 Linguistics Ph.D.  In the first of what we plan as a series, we interviewed Suzette by email and have posted the exchange on our new Interview Page.

Suzette, then a 32-year-old mother of four whose sf stories helped pay her way through the program, discusses the ongoing importance of linguistics to her writing over her career; the ways in which the speed of change in the ‘Real World’ makes it harder to keep sf ahead of reality; and the similarities between fantasy writing, anthropology and linguistics.

Suzette’s time at UCSD overlapped with that of Greg Benford (1967 Physics Ph.D.) and especially Vernor Vinge (1971 Mathematics Ph.D.).  The three never met, she tells us.  Wouldn’t that make a wonderful sf story, an imagined meeting on campus of three so very different writers, a la Tom Stoppard’s Travesties?

One of the big ideas we have for the UCSD-Clarion relationship focuses on the thin line between creativity in storytelling and creativity in science.   Stumbling across the web today and landing on Magic Dragon, I bumped into Ursula K. Le Guin’s description of the “creative spark” behind her cloning-focused story Nine Lives:

Omnivoracious, the Amazon blog where its book editors share their “passion for the written word through news, reviews, interviews, and more,” has a Clarionish post this morning, with Jeff VanderMeer interviewing Greg Frost on his latest, Shadowbridge.  In the course of the interview, Greg talks about his experience teaching Clarion this past summer, and harkens back to his own student days:

I’ve now taught, in order, the third, the last two and the first weeks. So if anyone’s looking for a teacher for weeks two and four, I’m willing to try them out now. The first week was sort of a combination of saying “This is how hard you’re going to work” and “These are the people who are just like you–they want it just as much as you do and that should unite you all.” That’s the common thread. No two people write the same way, but they’re all stretching to produce finished stories, and what one person knows might aid another, who might in turn have the missing piece you need. You can have a Clarion where they all tear each other to pieces, or you can have one where there’s a collective process of teaching and learning going on. I tried to kindle the latter. Stan Robinson warned them the first night that they would bond with the others in their group in ways they’d never anticipated. He’s right, because he and I were thrown together in 1975 at Clarion and that friendship has proven unshakeable. Robert Crais, who drove up to speak to them at the end of week one, is another permanent friend forged out of that Clarion class.

Think about it: Greg Frost, Stan Robinson and Bob Crais, together in the circle critiquing each other’s work in the Clarion way. Make me a fly on that wall.

This just in from the Clarion Foundation’s online newsletter: