The Clarion Workshop at UCSD

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:

Clive Thompson has a fascinating piece on science fiction in the latest Wired, “Why Sci-Fi Is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing.“  The article kicks off with a nice discussion of Cory Doctorow’s After the Seige (from his latest collection, Overclocked), but closes with the broader question:

So, then, why does sci-fi … get short shrift among serious adult readers? Probably because the genre tolerates execrable prose stylists. Plus, many of sci-fi’s most famous authors — like Robert Heinlein and Philip K. Dick — have positively deranged notions about the inner lives of women.

But the worm is turning. For whatever reasons — maybe the reality fatigue I’ve felt — a lot of literary writers are trying their hand at speculative fiction. Philip Roth used a “counterfactual” history — what if Nazi sympathizers in the US won the 1940 election? — to explore anti-Semitism in The Plot Against America. Cormac McCarthy muses on the nature of morality in the Hobbesian anarchy of his novel The Road. Then there’s the genre-bending likes of Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Susanna Clarke, and Margaret Atwood (whom I like to think of as a sci-fi novelist trapped inside a literary author).

Those aren’t writers whose books are adorned with embossed dragons. But that doesn’t mean they don’t owe that dragon a large debt.

Here at UCSD, we also think the worm is turning, although not because literary authors are writing science fiction so much as the fact that the world is changing so fast — both via technological advances and thanks to global warming — that science fiction provides unique opportunities to envision alternative futures.  Kim Stanley Robinson describes it as ”this science fiction novel that we are all living in.”  That’s why the interest at UCSD in hosting Clarion extends beyond the Literature Department, which has always viewed the divide between ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature as artificial, and into the sciences, the social sciences, and our various research units.

By the way, as to the ”execrable prose stylists” problem that Clive refers to, I’d have to say he’s not reading the same authors I am.  But if that worries you, one option is to attend the annual Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop.  Applications are being accepted now — for information, check here.

A recent post on the Federation of American Scientists web site announces a new grant they, in partnership with SRI and the University of Virginia, received from the Andrew Mellon Foundation:

FAS and SRI, with support from the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, will convene a series of 3 invitational summit meetings in 2008 that will bring together distinguished humanities scholars with experts in online communities research and virtual world technologies to identify how virtual world technology can be used to address significant issues in humanistic scholarship and advance scholarship. The findings from these summits will frame and inform further work to design, build, and populate a prototype virtual world, and evaluate its impact on advancing humanistic scholarship, scholarly communication, and learning.

I’m guessing here, but I think it’s a safe bet that the grant was based on their 2006 Summit on Educational Games.

Who better to help with questions around the populating of virtual world than the authors, students and alumni associated with the Clarion Workshop? Especially given UC San Diego’s very strong focus on virtual worlds and the technologies that underlie them, in labs like that of Adriene Jenik, Sheldon Brown, and the Calit2 Experimental Game Lab. Anyone interested in taking the lead?

Among the “new media” opportunities that help put sf and fantasy writers in front of new audiences — and make them more available for existing fans — are the increasing availability of downloadable videos of author events. One of the best is the Authors@Google series, which brings authors in during lunchtime for reading to assembled engineers. Examples from a quick YouTube search include Karen Joy Fowler and Kelly Link, April 2007; Joe Haldeman, Nov. 12, 2007, reading from The Accidental Time Machine; and Cory Doctorow on May 21, 2007, reading from Overclocked. (To see if a favored author has spoken there, check out the YouTube “@Google” channel site.)

A second stage of such programming (not counting the ubiquitous presence of Cory and other web pioneers among the authors, for whom being on the web is as central to their work as their writing) is starting to emerge. One example is Kim Stanley Robinson’s Dec. 21, 2007 TechTalk at Google.

Stan’s talk came following the announcement by Google that it would spend $100 million on climate change mitigation, and appears to be part of an effort by the company to put novel ideas in front of its engineers, to foster ideas from them in turn. In that vein, Stan’s speech is heavily focused on things Google could do to promote a better future.Here at UCSD we’re looking at the idea of organizing such writer events for companies that, unlike Google, aren’t of a scale and scope to pull in the authors on their own. Just as Stan’s Google talk was geared to what Google could do in response to climate change, what about talks at computing, digital media and printing companies imagining the digital environment five, ten, fifteen years out? Or at a cell phone manufacturer or service provider, imagining how new apps might maximize consumer uptake of technologies that allow immediate, localized responses to the world around us?

Spurring creativity — that’s really at the core of what Clarion is all about.