
Professor John Plotz (Brandeis University)
Nominated Fellow, April 2023
https://www.brandeis.edu/english/faculty/plotz.html
John Plotz (plotz@brandeis.edu) is Mandel Professor of Humanities at Brandeis University and editor of the B-Sides feature in Public Books. He co-hosts the podcast Recall This Book. His books include The Crowd (University of California Press, 2000), Portable Property (Princeton University Press, 2008), Semi-Detached (Princeton University Press, 2017) and Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea: My Reading (forthcoming Oxford, 2023).
Project title: Laughter is from Mars: SF, Games and Satire
From Gulliver’s Travels on, science fiction has taken its readers away from their own world so that they can gaze back on what they have left behind—and to laugh. Central to science fiction (SF)—especially in an era named Anthropocene to register the destructive capacity of our species—is a satirical sense of the absurdity of centering humanity in our conception of the Earth and the universe. That satire takes various historically emerging forms, with distinct political valences—sometimes it can be hilarious, other times mordant, occasionally both comic and profoundly dark. Always, though, it begins from the possibility of an anti-anthropocentric view: not so much sub specie aeternitatis as sub specie Martii (from a Martian perspective).
Laughter is from Mars had its origins as a genealogy of science fiction’s explosive growth in the era just after Darwin and just alongside Einstein. In early articles (on Richard Jefferies’ 1885 After London for example), I made the case that in the era often hailed as the birth of science fiction (between Well’s scientific romances of the 1890s and the magazine glory years of the 1930s) SF was constrained on the one hand by naturalism’s deterministic sense of an inescapable present, on the other by fantasy’s purely hypothetical unpacking of a fantastical cosmos elsewhere: David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus (1920) and Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930) are fascinating cases troubling the fantasy/sf border. In Laughter is from Mars, I extend the chronology to argue that over the centuries, four principal forms of SF developed: satire, philosophical puzzles, conservative comedy, and the ludic. The various forms emerged at distinct moments, but all four linger on through the decades and centuries continuing to recombine in fascinating and novel ways: Swift was an early satirist but Karel Capek and Stanislas Lem take up his mantle, Mary Shelley posed philosophical puzzles which Naomi Mitchison (Memoirs of a Spacewoman, 1962) extends into the ethnographic register. Laughter is from Mars aims for a synthetic account of the genre that accounts both for the emergence of satiric, comedic and ludic SF and for the persistence of older forms alongside.
My proposal is to spend April working on the as-yet-unwritten Chapter Four “Ready, Player?” That chapter begins from the premise that the “cyberpunk” of William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, embraced in such recent movies as Spielberg’s Ready Player One, has a deep and complex genealogy. At least as far back as Herman Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, science fiction (e.g. Fassbinder’s World on a Wire, Philip K Dick’s Time out of Joint, and Ursula Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven) has conceived of a virtual play-space that both mirrors and evades actuality. Following Huizinga’s conception of the ludic as sanctioned space apart, this chapter explores how a science-fictional game-space interacts with an external reality that is imagined as a desert alternative to a ludic oasis.