Suzette Haden Elgin, 1971 UCSD Linguistics Ph.D.
February 2008
Suzette Haden Elgin, an early UCSD Linguistics Ph.D. whose dissertation was on the Navajo language, is a leading feminist science fiction writer and founder of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. In the discussion below, conducted by email, she talks about her time at UCSD, the importance of Linguistics to her writing, and her current work.
Clarion: The May 1969 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction includes your first published story, ‘For the Sake of Grace.’ The introduction quotes you as follows: “I’m 32, married, have four children, and am working on my Ph.D. in Linguistics at the Univ. of California, San Diego, where I am a Graduate Assistant in French.” The first question the comes to mind is, How? But seriously, what was UCSD like back then?
Suzette Haden Elgin: For me, UCSD was as exotic as the plains of Mars, and as terrifying. The other grad students in linguistics — hypothetically my peers — were all able to stand up at orientation fandangos and announce that they’d done their undergraduate work at MIT or Princeton or Harvard or Yale or [vamp till ready]; I had to stand up and tell them that I had a degree from Chico State. They all looked and dressed like rock stars and sounded like geniuses when they talked; and there I was, with my Ozark accent and my little corduroy suit from Sears, and my hair in a bun. It was very much a “first contact” experience.
Clarion: That was the fall of 1968. What was it like by the time this story was published, the following May? These were the days of Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis, after all?
Elgin: Well, by that time I had let down my hair and switched from the decorous-enough-for-student-teaching oufits to dresses made of India bedspreads, so I didn’t stand out from the crowd quite so vividly. The atmosphere on our part of the campus was bittersweet …. intense sorrow over the war in Vietnam, and intense happiness over what we flower children then believed was going to be a revolutionary change in the U.S. culture. That change didn’t come to pass, of course, and the Vietnam War is still with us, but at the time we didn’t know things were going to turn out that way.
Clarion: Did your time at UCSD influence your writing?
Elgin: It was more the other way around; without the writing, I wouldn’t have been able to stay in the program. I wrote science fiction so that I’d be able to pay my tuition and buy my books.
Clarion: And how did your chosen field, Linguistics, influence your work?
Elgin: I don’t think I’ve ever written anything — fiction or nonfiction — that isn’t about linguistics; linguistics is my life. In my fiction I try very hard to include accurate basic information about language and linguistics in a form that isn’t just an infodump and that will hold the reader’s attention, because our public education system doesn’t provide people with that information. In my nonfiction I try to provide the same sort of information written in a way that can be understood by ordinary people; I’m afraid linguists have a well-deserved reputation of writing for “the happy few,” and I try hard not to do that.
Right now I’m working on a series of short stories, such as this one, about a future United States that has a U.S. Corps of Linguists (USCOL), trained to do fieldwork not only with Terran and humanoid languages but with nonhumanoid extraterrestrial languages as well. And as is true for most of sf today, I’m having trouble staying ahead of developments in the Real World; if it weren’t for my being able to write about working with ET languages, the Real World would be way ahead of me.
Clarion: You once mentioned to me that fantasy in particular is popular among academics in the social sciences, Linguistics, Anthropology, etc. Could you elaborate on that? Is it somehow related to fact that their fields seem to be mirror images, fantasy writers building worlds from nothing, anthropologists reconstructing lost worlds from whatever flotsam and jetsam was left behind?
Elgin: I wish it were for as romantic a reason as the one you propose; it would be especially satisfying if fantasy writers really could build worlds from nothing. But it’s not like that. Fantasy writers have to build their worlds from flotsam and jetsam, too, and building an entire fantasy world requires a lot of flotsam and jetsam. I think that for both linguistics and anthropology the tolerance for fantasy is a reflection of two intertwined factors. First, linguists and anthropologists are so accustomed to the improbable that the barriers to “suspension of disbelief” are very low. And second, both disciplines require topnotch skill at discovering patterns, often in places where the patterns are well hidden.
One final note: I think if you were to poll linguists you’d discover that we don’t consider linguistics a social science, not in the sense that I believe you’re using the term. In fact, it may be that the traditional distinction between the “physical” sciences and the “social” sciences no longer has much meaning.
Clarion: That’s true. Many of our most interesting research centers — like the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind — are all about that breakdown: the brain people (biologists) and mind people (cognitive scientists) recognized that they used the same brain imaging equipment but weren’t talking with one another. Now they are.
There’s a sense within some in the Clarion community that something similar is happening within sf and fantasy writers, in a different way. There’s an increasing number of young writers working in fantasy, magical realism, and related genres, and comparatively fewer in science fiction. It’s as if the increasing amount of technology in our lives makes sf less out of the ordinary. Do you have any sense of that?
Elgin: As I perceive it, the things that are happening in the Real World are more and more fantastic with every passing day, so that the boundary between what might be called “science fiction” and what might be called “fantasy” has grown hard to find. Five years ago I was reading news releases that sounded to me like science fiction; today I’m reading news releases that sound to me like fantasy. I suspect that this is partly because I’m seventy-one, but it can’t be entirely for that reason; I also hear it from young people commenting at my LiveJournal blog.
Clarion: When you were at UCSD, Greg Benford had just gotten his Physics Ph.D. the previous year; and Vernor Vinge arrived and got his Mathematics Ph.D. the same years that you did. Did you know them then? And how did three such creative people all end up at UCSD at the same time, when the school had only opened a few years earlier?
Elgin: I’m sorry to say that I didn’t know either Benford or Vinge. I was so desperately busy that I don’t think I knew anyone who wasn’t part of the Linguistics Program and/or the foreign language courses it supervised. I was doing my coursework and being a Graduate Assistant in French and running a house and looking after a batch of little kids at home and teaching Adult High School at night and writing books on the side.
As for why we three creative people all ended up at UCSD at the same time… I assure you, we were only a tiny fraction of the population of very creative people who were there.