 So, hi, welcome everyone at this last lecture by Martin Loos. I don't know if you've read about the last lectures, but it's something that extra murals in Studie Generalen are organizing for several years now, but it's inspired by a professor who really had to give his last lecture, and that became a very inspiring last lecture. You can find it on YouTube if you want. I forgot his name, I'm sorry, but you can find it there. His last lecture was about life and how to deal with life and how to go through life, etc. Today we have a last lecture by Martin, and so what we asked Martin is picture if this was your last lecture, if you knew about it, maybe just because you were going on a huge trip around the world or because it was really the last thing you could do, what would be the thing that you want to tell everyone? What was the topic that you want to address or that you say if I can choose by myself because no, there are no strings attached, I can just do what I want. What should I talk about? And Martin is going to talk about why you should read sci-fi and embrace your inner-nerd. Maybe it's a good thing to think about what would I do if I was asked this question to give a last lecture. I wouldn't know it, but glad that you came up with this topic. And Martin, maybe we spoke about it. You can introduce yourself, I think that's, and also by your lecture, but we're very pleased that you're here. Floor is yours. All right, thank you very much. Yes, so as I was graciously introduced, I'm Tan Loes. I'm a teaching assistant at the University College here at Tilbury University. I will be speaking about why you should read sci-fi because I find that very important and concomitant to that why you should embrace your inner-nerd. But first I want to start with a couple of disclaimers. The first one is last lecture, right? I mean this is barely my first, which means that I don't know either what I would want to speak about if this were indeed my last. And so I picked a topic I'm passionate about. I figured that will be best. Next to that I also want to stress that this is not my last lecture at all. I do not want to present myself as any sort of authority on the topic, right? I'm just mashing a couple of theories together about something I'm passionate about. And that sends hope to, well hopefully inspire you a little bit. Second disclaimer is I graduated a year ago from a comparative literary program in Utrecht, which means that my field is mostly in literature and hence books. But that doesn't mean that sci-fi is limited to only that of course. I'd also be using a lot of TV series and movies, but since my own field is mostly in literature I'll be using that mostly. So reading should also be taken more broadly than that, right? The consumption of a movie is also reading in this sense. Third disclaimer is science fiction is a very contentious genre, right? It's a niche genre. It's a genre fiction. There's a lot of nerds, right? Which means that people can get very angry very fast about something they love a lot, yet at the same time is often ignored by more literary critics or theorists or whatever, right? So with that in mind I do not want to get into one of those discussions on like what is sci-fi exactly, what is it not, right? You have these discussions on Reddit, they sometimes end up in death threats and that's not what I want to be a part of. So I will not exactly clear that up. I will define sci-fi in a way but in a slightly different angle because I believe that genre can be a fickle thing and that's a good thing, right? It should not be strictly defined in the first place because then it loses a lot of the stuff that I will be talking about I believe and definitions can be ambiguous. In fact I will be arguing for a certain potential of sci-fi that can shake loose definitions and that is why I believe it is so awesome, right? So what will I do today? First, as said I will look at what sci-fi is but I will focus on what it does and why it does that. Instead of just saying, right, stars is not sci-fi and Star Trek is, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, the whole shebang. No, what does it do? What makes science fiction science fiction to me and what does it, what does that mean for the larger genre, right? Second I'll be looking at the Novum, Estrangement Critique Metaphore and Speculation. This is the dry theoretical part. I'll be using literary theory here and a little bit of philosophy, right? So if these terms don't mean a lot to you, that's great. I'll tell you and I'll be spicing it up with a lot of examples hopefully to take some of the inherent dryness out of it. Then I look at what I call the the Libertory Potential of Science Fiction and that is why I believe you should read more sci-fi but we'll get there, yeah? Secondly, you, right? Why you? What do you have to do with all this? So first thing, what is science fiction, right? What is science fiction? Adam Roberts is a very respected name in the scholarship, in the field of scholarship of science fiction and he says that the term science fiction resists easy definition. This is a strange thing because most people have a sense of what science fiction is. I think most of you will feel the same way in that sense, right? So let's put that to the test for a little bit. Start, oh, Star Trek, the original series in this case. Is that, is that sci-fi? Yes. Yes? Any nose? All yeses? Oh, that's a tough crowd. Star Trek, sci-fi, yes or nay? Yes. All right, good, thank you very much. Gravity, 2003 film with Senator Bullock and George Clooney. Sci-fi, yeah or nay? Yes. Yes? Okay, all right. Frankenstein, the original novel by Mary Shelley, 1818. Is that sci-fi, yeah or nay? Yeah. All right, all right. 1984, George Orwell. Sci-fi? All right, then we have some confusion left and right. So I think that Adam Roberts, right, he hits a certain nerve. He's correct about a certain thing. What is sci-fi? We don't know. We have a sort of instinctual feeling about it, perhaps, or culturally given feeling, more likely. But what exactly it is is a good question, right? So let's turn to the critics. Let's see what the critics say about sci-fi. Perhaps they can help us out in figuring out what makes sci-fi sci-fi. First definition is a man called Damien Knight, both a sci-fi author and a critic. He said, science fiction means what we point to when we say it. That's very lame, right? It's not useful critically either. This man can't help us, even though he writes sci-fi himself. Edward James, a scholar. Science fiction is what is marketed as sci-fi. It's very cynical. Also lame, I would say, not very helpful either, right? Chuck Klosterman, cultural critic. Science fiction tends to be philosophy for stupid people. Yet Chuck Klosterman's own writing has been called in the review in The Guardian, reading for people who do not read, right? So this man is perhaps also not too useful. So the critics are not great. The critics are not great. They're not really helping us. Fearists, what about scholars of science fiction? Can they help us perhaps? Who knows? So let's take a look at Damien Broderick, who's a sort of father of modern science fiction scholarship. And he says about science fiction, science fiction is that species of storytelling native to a culture undergoing the epistemic changes implicated in the rise and supersession of technical, industrial, modes of production, distribution, consumption, and disposal. It is marked by metaphorical strategies and metanomic tactics, the foregrounding of icons and interpretive schemata from yada, yada, yada, yada. That's not helpful either, right? It's way too convoluted. What does that say? It says so much it doesn't say anything, which funnily enough we often see happening in sci-fi too, right? The flux capacitor, all that stuff. So theory is not very useful either, it seems. So who do we turn to? And I personally turn to Darko Souven, who was a Croatian born science fiction scholar or became a science fiction scholar over the year, I believe. Born in Zagreb, he emigrated to the States first and then to Canada after it. And in Canada he became a professor in Montreal at McGill. And this is the kind of guy you need to turn to, right? When you talk about sci-fi, right? He looks at what does it do, right? And what is the thing that it does that makes it different from other genres, right? And different from other modes of writing. And he points at what he calls the Noven. The Noven is the new thing, right? In a science fiction story. The new thing that crystallizes the difference between the world of fiction and the real world outside. So he says there's a thing in science fiction or multiple things, right? A single story can have multiple novel that are new and make it different from the story we're reading and the world we're in on a daily basis. Or which I like to call using Darko Souven. An estranging yet plausible narrative mechanism grounded in materialism, most often based on science and technology. Right? What does that mean? First of all, estranging is a strange word there. Souven himself, he draws on Ernst Bloch, a Marxist scholar, and he uses estrangements in the sense of alienation or defamiliarization. We'll get back to that. That's very important, right? So it's estranging and plausible. Those are the two big terms right now that are important. So according to Souven, this Noven, this new thing provides a point of difference from the real world and what we're reading or what we're watching. Yeah? Robert the man who at the very start gave us that quote about, gave us that quote about not being able to define sci-fi easily, right? That same man, hands called science fiction, the encounter with difference because of this thing called the Noven, right? So some classic Nova in sci-fi, for example, time travel, right? Faster than light in the stellar travel, the alien matter transportation, the robot, these sort of things. These are all classic Nova in sci-fi. And so what do they do? They are estranging because they're not what we're used to in our daily lives, right? Yet they might be plausible. So they're weird but potentially real at some point, somewhere, right? Do note that time travel and faster than light in the stellar travel, that's mostly Nova back from the 50s and the 60s, right? So yes, I know Einstein exists, but they're still classic Nova. Okay, that's cool. So we have this thing. We have a Noven, right? A thing that can help us define sci-fi as opposed to non sci-fi, but also as opposed to the real world. So and that Noven is first of all speculative but plausible, right? It may be real. It's based on science and technology most often. And it is estranging. It is weird, right? And so in that case, I would say Star Trek is full with Nova. Yeah, chock full with Nova. And so you're right. According to this definition, the definition of Dr. Suven, Star Trek is very much science fiction. So it's 1984, right? Surveillance, double thing, the whole shebang, those are Nova. They might be real. They might become real yet they're still speculative. So it's Frankenstein, right? I think the estrangement part there is very good. It's very, very, very, very palpable. But might also still be real because Mary Shelley specifically wrote that Frankenstein, the monster, is built in a scientific way. There's no ghost involved. There's no phantom. There's nothing supernatural there, right? So a lot of scholars see, in fact, see Frankenstein as the start of sci-fi, one of the very most early sci-fi stories. Gravity, however, does not contain any Nova. There's nothing there which is new, which is a point of difference from the world as we know it. There's nothing there which is just changing in that sense, not speculative, right? The Hubble Space Telescope is very real, so is space debris, so is crashes between these things. This is a drama set in space but not science fiction. So the Novem. The Novem seems to be an awesome little thing that we can look at because it talks about what sci-fi does, right? Not necessarily about what it is, but what it does. And on the basis of that, we can look at the potential of science fiction as well because the Nova, if it is speculative, plausible, yet astranging, that of course lends itself very well to prediction, right? And it's like a classic trope that sci-fi predicts all sorts of phenomena that later happen, right? So Jules Verne, classic, right? Same man who rode around the world in 80 days and 20,000 leagues under the sea. He also rode from the earth to the moon in 1865. And it's the first moon landing in fiction, never ridden. Apparently they smoke cigars on the moon once they get there, but, right? And so 100 years later, of course, the Apollo 11 mission, they went to the moon. A bit different than Verne predicted. He thought we would shoot a train into space. Nevertheless, we landed on the moon, right? Correct prediction. Gernsback is a classic in what they call the golden age of sci-fi. So in this story, Rolf, first of all, we see some sort of, I don't know, Skype, right? RetroSkype, something like that. But it also contains a description. This is in fact a diagram that's in the original publication of polarized wave apparatus sending waves to a space flyer, right? A spaceship. And that's then locked back into this ectinoscope that can then measure where the space flyer is relative to the wave apparatus. That's a radar, right? That's a radar. So that's, well, the radar was mostly innovated in the first world part and really started being used in the form that we know it now in the second world part. So, correct prediction. Well done, Gernsback. Aldous Huxley. We know Aldous Huxley, right? Brave New World. By the way, Margaret Atwood reviewing it as a masterpiece of speculation, we're on the right track here, speculation. It contains, of course, Soma, the drug that everybody takes to be happy. I don't know how many tons of like Prozac and Xanax and that sort of stuff are sold every day, but that started happening in the 50s and the 60s mostly. So once again, 30 years prior or so, correct prediction. Heinlein, Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers, made into an awesome movie as well by Paul Verhoeven in the 90s. It's a good watch. Very nice. Lots of alien blood and all that. It's great. Also talked about exosuits or power armor. So you have these marines and they go into an alien world and they have this sort of extra suit around them that makes them stronger, makes them carry more weight, makes them able to kill a lot of alien bugs, right? It's very real research being done right now. This is by Lockheed Martin in exosuits, right? So this man is carrying, I don't know how many hundreds of kilos of weight he's still able to push up. I think it's cheating. Nevertheless, that's a correct prediction, yeah? R.C. Clark, one of who with Rama talks about a, you have a telescope array on the earth called the space guard that monitor near earth objects to make sure that we're not surprised by an asteroid that suddenly crashes into the earth or whatever, right? The space guard instead finds an alien spaceship, nothing, and they go and explore it, right? Space guard, they call it. It's the actual space guard founded in the 90s in the south of the UK that's monitoring the near earth for objects that might crash into us. It's called after the space guard in Clark's book, right? So prediction. It seems to be that the Novum, this new thing, this point of difference, right? This is a strange, yet plausible lens itself to the prediction of things that then actually turn out to happen in the real world, right? I'm not interested in that. I don't find that very useful. I find it pretty lame. I think there's, it's a bunch of, right? This is older sci-fi, a bunch of white man telling other white man that they might be correcting the future and then they turn out to be in and they say, whoa, hey, we were right, right? I don't think that's very, I think you waste the potential of the Novum in that, right? There's a Novum which is a strange thing and which is plausible. So I think you waste the potential. Furthermore, as often as they are right in predicting things, they are wrong, right? And for me, that is flying cars, right? How many flying cars have you seen in sci-fi? How many flying cars have you seen in real life? Are they happening anytime soon? No, because it's very impractical, I think. So we have the Novum. We have this awesome definition of what sci-fi can do and what makes sci-fi different from other forms of narrative in our case. Yet this Novum, it gives us the potential to predict, yet this prediction seems to be not all that, right? So what do we do then? Let's take a closer look at the Novum and let's get to do hard of some of the things I'm trying to say, right? So if we go back to what Robert's called science fiction, an encounter with difference. And so that works on that sort of first axis of the Novum, which is estrangement. Because that means that the Novum in sci-fi can show us something which is slightly different from our daily lives, yet we do recognize in a way, right? It's like, hey, something in there. This seems familiar to me, but in a weird way, in a strange way. It's Xercer Rene, which is also a Marxist sci-fi scholar, as called as defamiliarization. So we have a phenomenon in real life. And in sci-fi, it is presented to us as a Novum, but it's actually talking about the thing that we already have in real life. But it defamiliarizes it in such a way that we can start thinking new things about that. And Xercer Rene says there's two ways of doing that. The first is by extrapolation. We extrapolate a new phenomenon into a Novum. So taking it to its logical extreme most often, right? Or projecting it into the future. What if we keep on doing this? Then what happens? Or by displacing it? So taking something we know, and I'm putting it on something very strange, putting it on a Novum, putting it on an alien, putting it on whatever, right? It seems a bit abstract. So let's take a look at that, right? We all know surveillance. We know Big Brother is watching us, right? We know that's true. You extrapolate that to its logical extreme and before you know it, you're in 1984. It's no coincidence that we call these technologies Aurelian as a result, extrapolation. So we might not think too much about surveillance in our daily lives, but if we extrapolate it in science fiction, we start thinking like, hey, maybe it's not such a great idea, right? It defamiliarizes surveillance in our daily lives, blows it up, extrapolates it, and we can start thinking about it. Displacement, right? Frank Herbert Duhn was written in 65, also came out as a great movie by the Neville and Neuf last year, I believe, in which a bunch of people who look like this and have first names like Paul go to a planet with a lot of military might and all that, right? The planet, which is entirely a sand planet. On that planet live people like that, and they go there to get a very, very valuable material that enables interstellar travel. So what are we talking about here, right? Are we talking about Duhn, are we talking about the Spice Melange, are we talking about spaceflight, are we talking about oil, right? Displacement. By way of the Novum, something that is familiar to us, so familiar and affected often we cannot think about it. By displacing it, it becomes more tangible for us to think about, right? So that is the first axis of the Novum, Estrangement, that I believe is wasted in prediction, but it is very interesting in other strands of sci-fi. That's the thing I want to point your attention to first, Estrangement. Robert even says that because of this, this axis of Estrangement that specific science fiction Novum are more than just gimmicks, more than just cliches. They provide a symbolic grammar for articulating the perspective of normally marginalized discourses of race, of gender, of non-confirmism and alternative ideologies. We might think of this as a progressive or vertical potential of science fiction, right? It's very hard to talk about some things, but if these things are all of a sudden aliens then we can't talk about them, right? Let's look at some examples of this. Let's see if this is real, let's see if this Estrangement part of the Novum actually gives us something useful, right? Because it will mean that we can use science fiction as a critique, a critique of current things, right? A critique of current power structures or whatever that may be wrong but are very hard for us to talk about unless we defamiliarize them. For example, why are the worlds? The original by Welles. Most people are familiar with the later one by Orson Welles, I believe, which is set in California. The original was set in Victorian England at the time when the British Empire was at its height and was using, amongst other things, was using technological superiority to colonize half of the world, right? And why are the worlds, a technological superior Martians come down from Mars and conquer Victorian London? And then there's a passage at one point about the worlds in which Welles says, well, if we think that the Martians are doing this to us and that's bad, then what's up with the colonies, right? Displacing. Herland is a classical feminist science fiction. There's an ovum, which is the fact that women can reproduce without men, create beautiful utopia. A couple of men come into Herland and mess everything up, of course, but it's projected as a sort of, hey, what if women had suffrage, right? What if we could say something? What would our society look like? Extrapolation. RUR is a play in the 1920s, a Czech play coined the term robot. The first time the term robot came up and they invented a bunch of robots and they have to do all hard labor in society. These robots, they rise up, of course, revolution, that whole story, right? So we see here that by way of metaphor, by extrapolating, or by displacing, we can critique things that otherwise we might not be able to see, by defamiliarizing them, by placing them on an ovum, right? Estrangement. So that gives us the potential of science fiction as critique. This is Solaris, which is a classic of sci-fi in which a character says at some point, we don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as a Sahara, another as frozen as a North Pole, yet another as large as the Amazon Basin. We are only seeking man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. And so that's the first potential I see in science fiction. You can mirror these things to us, right? By placing them on an alien, on a robot, or by projecting a feminist utopia. So science fiction as critique, right? It works by a way of metaphor. I think this one is very clear, right? Futurama is not about the future. It's about the right now. But by way of a metaphor, by displacing things in a futuristic sort of environment, it critiques stuff in the now, in the here and the now. So in that sense, the ovum can function as a metaphor for our own time. And in that sense, as a critic I really like, it's not use of sci-fi, but it's actually into a feminist science fiction scholars. She says that science fiction points at an absent but possible other present, right? Try to let that sink in for a minute. By critiquing those things right now that we are very hard to see, displacing them onto a novum, we're actually thinking about how our current present could be different, right? And so that often, in this case of the novum, it functions as a metaphor. Forcing robots to work for us is like oppression of the proletariat, right? So referring to RUR that the theater player just showed you. The novum as a metaphor. Forcing robots to work for us is like the oppression of the proletariat, right? So in its functioning, this metaphor, it's the same like man is like a wolf. A is like B, right? Metaphor. Now if you want to think about metaphor, you can always turn to this man who is Paul Rickeur, who went 2003, or the massive tone on metaphor. It's called the use of metaphor, but it's really like it's a massive book. And he has some interesting things to say about metaphor, right? So what this guy claims, if you look at man as like a wolf, he says, the system of implications does not remain unchanged by the action of the metaphorical utterance. To apply the system is to contribute at the same time to its determination. The wolf appears more human at the moment than by calling the man a wolf on places the man in the special light. That's interesting, right? I think you see his points, right? Man is like a wolf does not only do not only man is modified by the statement, but so is the wolf, which of course means that by forcing robots to do work for us, if that is like the oppression of the proletariat, then these two things also interact in certain ways. The metaphor in some way not only is a figure of speech in a non-existing world, but it also has an actual feedback on reality. What does that mean? Yes, so it seems to imply that there's something more to the novum. If the novum is a metaphor that we can use to criticize our current conditions, perhaps there's something more to the novum, right? If a metaphor also changes the system of implications, there's also shaped the way in which we perceive reality. And that's an interesting thought, right? So not only critique stuff, but it can also change the way we perceive that stuff. I'm really seeing the praises of science fiction here, right? And I think it's good to sometimes take a step back and say like, oh, is that really the case, right? Is the novum really capable of this? Because we also have this sort of stuff, right? Man finally created a machine with feelings. Was the author really mostly concerned with feelings or something else, right? Galaxina. This sort of stuff, is this really something that changes the way we perceive reality? Is he correct? Does he make any sense, right? What's up with the flying cars? If it's true that the metaphor also changes reality, what's up with that, right? Well, I think he does have a point. Because I think that with these flying cars, even though they don't exist, nor probably ever will, if they happen, it will be because some guy read a lot of sci-fi and figure like, hey, I want to make a flying car, right? If flying cars happen, then I don't know what the headline on the newspapers will be like. The future is here, right? If we get flying cars, this is what the newspapers will say. And so that means not so much that this is this changing of reality by the metaphor, right? It means that the way we perceive stuff. We now, the novum, the flying car, the novum of the flying car is a metaphor for the future itself. Any narrative in which you will find flying cars, you know, haha, that's the future, right? But it also means that we now think something else about the future in a world in which we never had thought of flying cars in the first place, right? Strange, strange. Need some more, some more, some more plucking apart. So for that, I want to return to Darko and look at the second, the second axis of the novum, which is speculation, right? So we go back to Darko's third definition, right? The novum in a strange yet plausible narrative mechanism. And that makes SF an encounter with difference, right? Remember. So the strange part we looked at, we didn't look at the plausible part yet. The plausible part I connect to what I call speculation, right? That means not wild speculation, but it means something that may come true. That is, per definition, not true right now, but may come true. It's grounded in some sort of plausible, as he calls it, future. So what does that mean, right? Well, the flying cars, for example, it's not about the cars could be real. It's not about the prediction part, right? As I said, I don't care about that. It's about the fact that we can speculate about flying cars in the first place, yeah? So the novum shakes something up in our thinking. In fact, in some ways, this speculative part of the novum, next to the estranging, we're talking about the speculative part now, it enables new ways of thinking. It enables thinking there where previously you could not. It opens up your thinking. And sometimes that's about aliens and laser guns. And sometimes that's about something more, right? And then because of the metaphor, also affecting reality as per Paul Recours, that also influences what we can think in the first place. So in this respect, speculation is a critical gesture that shapes the way we perceive reality and envision our future. That's my take on speculation. But is that so, right? Invaders from Mars. Awesome. This is awesome, a little bit of trivia. This is the first colorized sci-fi movie, or at least like sci-fi as in aliens and death beams and all that, right? Came out in 1953. It's plot has a bunch of alien abductions first before the aliens, before the Martians invade Earth. Why is that, right? To probe some things and gather some intel and all that. The funny thing is, I'm not, nobody knows, nor do I, where it is entirely this movie. But alien abduction stories only start happening since after this movie came out. Before very simple stories came out, right? But it mostly had to do with religious appearances, that sort of stuff, right? Meeting cryptids, right? Susquatch, but not a great alien, right? Ever since this movie came out, alien abduction stories are massive. So this does seem to shape the way we perceive reality. William Gibson, Euromancer. It's a very cool book. It came out in 1984. It's generally seen to be the start of the cyberpunk genre, as they call it. Some of you might know the game as well, right? Everything is shit. Everything is edgy. But what's also especially important about this book is that he coined the term cyberspace. So the idea was you have hackers and they plug themselves into a machine and then a part of them, or at least a digital version of them, is actually is in the machine. These versions of themselves, they look like a certain way, you can program what you look like yourself in cyberspace. So first of all, this book not only coined the term cyberspace, but it also came up with the idea of an avatar. Second life, I don't know if you know the game. The metaverse is this. This is the metaverse, hopefully just less shitty because it's quite post-apocalyptic in this book. So this also seems to shape how we think about us in cyberspace, in digital space, in the first place. Us as little walking avatars with a funny hat on, this book. Isaac is a classic, of course, in sci-fi. Jokester is a Little Moon story, however. It's about a bunch of people who have to escape from an artificial reality, from a stimulated reality, which influenced a lot of people, of course. Simulated realities. We have Philip K. Dick. We can remember it for you wholesale, about a man who was not quite sure whether he went to Mars or didn't, because was that an artificial memory implanted in his brain or not, was adapted into a fantastic Schwarzenegger movie, which you should absolutely watch if you haven't. It was a massive influence on The Matrix. The Matrix, of course, there's an entire simulated reality in which people live. Do you wake up? Do you take the red pill or do you not? Which, in turn, all of these books and movies before that influenced Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, who took away the, we can save you from the stimulated reality part and says, well, maybe that's all we are. Maybe we're just in a simulated reality. Maybe we are simulations too. Simulation theory, which from there, of course, was picked up by some people by a certain man who may or may not own Twitter, and God knows where it goes from there, but simulated reality started with Isaac Asimov. So my claim being that it does shape the way we perceive reality, by way of the metaphor, by way of the second axis of the Novum, which is about speculation. And that is where my claims come together, because you have these two axes, we have the estrangement axis, which is about our present, our current presence, and enables us to critique that current presence by saying that under present group are like robots and these robots are oppressed. Hey, what about their own world? And we have the second axis of speculation, which shapes our perception of reality, but also of what is or is not possible in the future. So that talks about the future. That is why I think the Novum, as proposed by Darko Souven, is so great. However, I think, I maintain, that he falls short of looking at what happens if you do these things at the same time. What happens if the Novum does both of these things? What happens on the ninth point of a combination between estrangement and speculation? Because that is what sci-fi can do. In fact, according to Souven, that is what makes sci-fi unique, as opposed to fantasy, for example, which is not plausible, but is estrangement. So I think that if you combine these two, you can make science fiction potentially liberatory, because it makes it able to reimagine the present by imagining other realities. Is the Novum estrangement critiques our current presence? The speculation of the Novum also shapes our perception and our vision of the future. That means that sci-fi can help us rethink our present, reshape our reality, our perception of reality of the present, and enable other visions of what the future may be. And that is pretty crazy. Xiu Yongqiu, therefore called science fiction high-intensity realism. He has got a lot of shit for that, because if there is one thing that science fiction is not its realism, most people seem to think. He says, no, it's high-intensity realism. Science fiction is able to represent things, real things, that realism cannot. And that is other presence, to shape our reality. So I believe that this encounter with difference, as science fiction was called by Adam Roberts again, is a science fiction to me. The encounter with difference that enables us to think beyond the status quo. That only enables us to shake it up as critique can, but also enables us in the same movement to envision other realities. And in that sense, I call it liberatory. First of all, because it's liberatory for thought, make sure that we can think about stuff beyond our usual thinking, and it can potentially be liberatory also in a political sense, in a social sense, in a cultural sense. That's a big claim. So what do we do with that? What does sci-fi look like, if that is what it does? Well, this is the point where I just started listing my favorites. Star Trek, still going strong, still being absolutely awesome. Basically, a bunch of communists in space working together to beat the odds. Fantastic. Both is changing. Communism doesn't work like that in our own world, and brings a shitload of novems to help you create that vision. Right? Ursula Le Guin, who is an amazing author, two of her most well-known science fiction books. We have The Left Hand of Darkness, is the one on the right. It's about a male man who lands on a planet in which everybody is genderless, with the exception of, I think, four days in the month. This man is freaked out, of course. He doesn't know how to deal with these people. Also happens to be that he's an ambassador from another race. So he has to. Fantastic. This possessed is about two planets that orbit each other. The one is a capitalist society. The other one is an anarcho-syndicalist society. One man goes back and forth. What happens, right? And they're also combined with beautiful character studies. Beautiful books in their own terms. That is as strange as, and that speculates. That helps us to think beyond our usual conception of gender, of what we think is capitalism, the end of western society or not, those sort of things, right? And you're reading a very nice book. That's good stuff, right? Octavia Butler, Lilis Bruth, about a woman who was kidnapped by aliens, who, these aliens, they have to use genes from other species to reproduce. It really reconsiders race and the way we think of race, especially in a biological way. Ian Banks, again, space communists, but this time with very massive weapons as well, right? And how did they maintain their little communist hippie utopia in the future? They have to get their hands very dirty, right? Spoiler. Makes for a fantastic reading. That Chiang, top left, story of your life about a woman who is exposed to an alien language, which leads her to receive time as happening simultaneously instead of linearly. That has massive consequences for ethics, for how she relates herself to her daughter, to how she relates herself to politics, was adapted by Denis Villeneuve as a rival, also a fantastic film. Because you are an issue-neuter. Never let me go. What if we do get clones? Clones are awesome, especially for their organs. But what do the clones think of that, winning from the perspective of the clones? Paolo Bagigalupi is American. The Windup Girl, book about set in Thailand after an ecological disaster, right? Massive climate crisis. Thailand is the only country that somehow managed to stay upright in all this. And you get eco-terrorists and agri-conglomerates and all that sort of stuff trying to figure out what Thailand is doing, what they did wrong. But it's like a thriller, right? Like sort of crime detective sort of thriller is about our current relationship to the natural world and also to our current ecological treatment of what we call third world countries, right? Is it okay to ship our trash off to Thailand or Malaysia? Black Mirror. All right, we just talked about these two qualities of the Novena, estrangement and speculation, Black Mirror. Ex Machina. Fantastic movie as well, it's by Alice Garland. What if we start touring testing but the machine with touring testing is actually intelligent? What does the machine think of that, right? And so these sort of things is what sci-fi can do. And I maintain that that is because this combination of these two qualities of the Novena, estrangement on the one hand and speculation on the other hand. And if we combine these two, then not all sci-fi, not all sci-fi, but a certain way of doing sci-fi has liberatory potential, right? Liberatory potential because it opens up our thinking and because it can critique but also envision alternatives to stuff that is just wrong right now. And what does it have to do with you? So there's a bit of a rhetorical title I'll have to give you that, right? Like embracing your inner nerd. I mostly mean read sci-fi, right? Go for it. But also take it seriously, yeah? Take it seriously. It's genre fiction and often seen as this as pulpy. It often is, right? It often is. But it also forms a sci-fi that are not pulpy. And I believe that few fictional genres hold that same liberatory potential exactly because of the Novena, right? Exactly because what I hoped I just told you, I just communicated to you. Or at least, right, are inclined towards this potential. So like I see it's not that other genres would not be able to do this, but sci-fi is like loaded dice, right? So you roll them and it's you're more likely to get this potential. Connected to that, of course, I plead to also take it seriously. Estrangement and speculation is literary and as critical modes. It's a way of thinking, right? And it's a way of interrogating the world and to take seriously your own imagination. Yes, do note that all of this stuff, all of these Novums, right, they're points of difference. They're fundamentally not possible if you lose sight of your imagination. Take that seriously, right? And do not be, do not scoff towards non-realist modes of thinking or of telling a narrative, right? Take that seriously. Next to that, science fiction is genre fiction. I started off with that, right? Which means it's mostly a bunch of nerds. It's not very big. It's pretty hard to make money off of it, which means that it needs its creators, its fans and its scholars, right? So if you have a little bit of a heart for this, then pay for your book, right? Go see that movie. It's important. The genre needs it. The genre really, it's like liking metal bands, you know? Like pay that CD, right? Otherwise they'll just have to stop. And finally, science fiction, right? Sort of tying all these things up. As a speculative genre, it needs to imagine that there's people, which means that yes, embrace your inner nerd, right? Do not be afraid to be imaginative. The genre needs it. I think thinking needs it as well. Your reading could use a little of it, perhaps, right? Your writing to sci-fi is what we need. Sci-fi we should take seriously. Thank you very much. Thank you, Martin. We may have time for some questions. This is someone who has a question for Martin. Yeah. I'll use, please use the mic because we're recording this. Of course. So you cite sort of these various ideas that sort of turned into progress, which is sort of scientific progress and these ideas of science fiction as a positive driving force that's liberatory, socially and technologically. But then there's also considerations to make about, of course, some of the works that you cite, of course, are dystopic scientific works and they drive humanity in directions where we sort of, or at least in these liberal, neoliberal institutions sort of don't necessarily wants. So there's also these ideas coming out of Warwick in the late 90s from CCRU. I'm not sure if you're familiar with them. But it's a research unit of philosophy students and they come up with the idea of hyperstition, whereby ideas come from science fiction or come into conception through human imagination. And then through their introduction into a common literary stream, they become inevitable as driving forces for thoughts and progress and development of ideas. So of course, maybe not flying cars quite yet. Hopefully never looking at how safe people drive. But then this idea of progress, which is inevitably driving itself. And then if you connect it to the ideas of certain philosophers on, you know, regressionism in these conceptions of agrarian society where they find sort of a malthusian tipping points in technology. So in industrial societies, Ted Kuzinski talks about a point whereby the damage to society becomes so insurmountable where there is a point of no return. And then you reach current talkings. I was recently reading an article about a professor from UC Berkeley who discusses, for example, blockchain technology and the idea of how, you know, some people conceptualize it as progressive, especially saying, well, there's such energy demand that we must turn to green energy. And then the critique of this is essentially we're just holding progress together by holding a gun to it and saying, well, we have to. And this inevitability that we have to process through. So is it always necessarily a positive change forward for technology, science fiction and human imagination? Well, thank you. Well, first of all, I don't think that progress is inevitable, especially technological process, right? That's a frame that we give it. And often that's misused. So I know of a philosophical qualm already with that first premise, right? It's not so we make of it. So we do, you know, technology is not going to progress itself if we don't make it in the first place. Secondly, you are right, though. I mean, like I showed Starship Troopers, for example, before, Heinlein, right? Man was a convinced fascist. The book also talks about you only get voting rights if you have done military service, for example. However, that movie that Paul Verhoeven made out of it that I talked about before earlier as well, Paul Verhoeven grew up under Nazi occupation in the Netherlands. He made a master satire out of it, right? And all the all the intelligence officers in the movie that walk around in Gestapo outfits and all that. So the point is there that both of them ended up using their imagination. I think it's also, like I said, also take yourself seriously, perhaps not only as a scholar often as a producer, but also as a reader of sci-fi also you use your imagination, right? It's not a sort of strap yourselves in and sit back and just go for the for the right. It's an active process of speculating and of estranging. So yes, this progress can go in multiple ways and we should be on the outlook for it. But I think it can also be self reflective in such a way that progress can in fact be interrogated by estrangement, by speculation, right? So but we do need to be on our guard to keep these things happening. You're very right, you're very true. Also that the galaxy thing that I showed, right, the feeling robot, yeah that's not, that's not, right? So hence I've been stressing for potentially and for certain forms of sci-fi do this, but I do believe it has an inherent capability of doing that because of this self-reflexive part of imagination, right? And also hence take yourself seriously, take sci-fi seriously, take us seriously. These ideas are not just, right, I've argued for these ideas are not just ideas. Is that sort of engaged with? Yeah, all right, thank you. Is he not a question? Well thank you so much for this lovely lecture, last lecture. I'm quite new to sci-fi actually, so I was wondering because you said estrangement and speculation as present and future. What do you think about the past? Is there something that sci-fi can play in the past? Did we imagine the renaissance and we were plugged in during the time or something like that? Do you think the past can play a role? It's a good question, thank you. You have alternative history, right, which is often seen as also part of sci-fi. I think The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick is the biggest, the most well-known example of that. And so it depends on is there this lov-um still, it's still this point of difference. And often you'll see that like in these alternative histories, the Nazis have formed the war, right? That's Philip K. Dick, that's The Man in the High Castle. And then that of course also creates a world, a different world from ours, which is both estranging yet plausible. So yes, it can work in the past. It's not the most seen genre, the sub-genre of sci-fi, let's say, but it definitely can work that way, yes, anymore. When a lov-um is not like important like a flying car, but still can shape our prediction of the future, can this also be called fantasy? All right, so if I understand, well, no, no. By definition, right? So the lov-um has to be estranging yet plausible. And that is what makes it a lov-um. And so that's also why an orc is not a lov-um, most classically seen, because an orc is not plausible. Right? And so that's in at least in Darko Souven's, right? So also the whole lov-um theory is also what demarcates science fiction from fantasy. Now you have, of course, an enormous amount of fiction that is exactly entirely on that border there. So to too sharply demarcate, as I said, I don't think that's good. I think that also goes against the spirit of what I've been trying to say here. All right, so at some point you're free to call something but an orc is using a laser-good science fiction, right? Sure. Go ahead. And in fact, there might be some very interesting thinking to be done with an orc with a laser gun, right? Does that answer your question? You always stress plausibility, but where would we draw the line? Where would you decide what something is plausible and when it isn't? Yes, very good question, critical question. Thank you. Yeah, I don't. I don't really. It depends on your imagination as well, right? What do you think? You should write a book. All right? I think you're right. So but once again, so this, like I said, I do not want to argue for too stringent of definitions because I think that sort of collapses the whole idea in the first place, right? And as a fact that in these sort of gray areas is where some very good thinking can be done, is done, will be done. And so the plausibility of it is mostly that very old discussion of is Star Wars, is that sci-fi or not, right? And a lot of people say, like, well, this stuff isn't explained. It's not plausible, right? It's a lightsaber. It's a lightsaber, but nobody's telling me how this is working in hands. It's not plausible. And so people say that is not sci-fi, right? I'm on the fence. I think there's plenty of novums in there, depending on how imaginative you are, how plausible you do find it or do not find it. Maybe sci-fi as well, right? It might be a perfectly working novum for you. So I don't want to be too stringent on these things, but usually more as a sort of initial guiding role, right? What is important is what a novum does, a stringing and speculation. And not so much is this a novum or is it not? Does that answer your question? All right. Thank you. I see one more question. I think that's the last one, because we have to wrap it up. But then that you ran into a problem that you're using this tool only to look back at what was speculative, engaging, etc., and then from back from the end to you project the means of, this is novum of, well, oh yeah, this has done this effect of how it's novum. In the sense of, okay, if you have this tool and all the effects that it engages you with the literature feel really real to you, etc., but then when you look back, we cannot say, oh yeah, this is specifically this novum as a tool and then working with it in a sense of like really thinking of, yes, this works as it is. Then yeah, then you ran into the problem of basically looking back and say, and just basically being very selective about it. I'm not sure I entirely understand. Could you repeat the gist of the question? So basically my question is rather, okay, if you, well, if you pause it, this is novum, etc., don't you then run into problems of that, okay, no, novum produces these effects, but when these effects basically, you know, research, etc., or you basically read the literature and then they uphold themselves in front of you. Then you run into a problem that basically you only see those effects in a sense and then look back in order to see the novum or don't you have any other better criteria in establishing the novum as well, not just only this thing that does these effects, but also like, you know, this is a mechanism that works within the sci-fi, I think is more and more the latter. Yeah, it's not necessarily by looking back, right, it's also looking at the present, it's more, and so this novum can change over time as well, because what is plausible, what might not be in the other. So once again, I like this test that the novum, I find that so important because it looks at what it does. And so in these terms, I'm as much arguing for speculation and estrangement as frames of thinking, right, as much as the specificity of the novum. I think it finds a very, right, very palpable and very useful form in sci-fi, right, it's like these very critical and imaginative ways of thinking with laser guns. So, which makes it better for me, but also more accessible to a lot of people, I believe, and easier to think with in the first place, right, because it's less dry, and it's more imaginative, and so that can help people to pick up these nova better than read the gore, right. Does that answer your question? All right, thank you.