#1 SCI-FI AS RE-STORY-ATION: Origin Stories, Truth/truth, & Indigeneity in The Anthropocene

This is the first lecture for the 2024 summer session of ENGLISH 3372 for The Ohio State University, taught by PhD Candidate Peyton Del Toro. This lecture cites the opening excerpt, “Skywoman Falling,” from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass. In that excerpt, Kimmerer puts the Western origin story of Eve in conversation with the indigenous origin story of Skywoman. She asks, can we—a nation of immigrants living on Turtle Island—use Skywoman’s origin story as instructions for becoming indigenous to/with our local environments? Peyton introduces the Ancient Greek philosophers Protagoras and Plato, which came into Western thought during the Reinaissance. This time period was when Western thinkers returned to ancient Greco/Roman texts, and Peyton traces that strain of thought through to modern educational systems that separate science from the humanities. Protagoras and Plato are mentioned as a way of understanding objective Truth studied in science versus subjective truth taken up in the humanities. In this lecture, Peyton puts feminist science and technology scholars like Donna Haraway in conversation with humanities-based theorists such as Gloria Anzaldúa as a practice of interdisciplinarity/postdisciplinarity. By refusing to put science and story at odds with each other, we arrive at the transformative potential of science fiction. Sci-Fi, as a literary genre, offers a way for us to blur the lines between science and fiction, between imagination and reality. “I am not concerned with whether any specific origin story is True; rather, I am interested in the cultural truths produced through such stories. It’s not about whether or not they happened, or how they came to be—it’s that the stories themselves exist, and they inform the way we understand the various other stories we hear and tell throughout our lifetime.” “In this class, we are not listening to one story and not another. In this class, we will always listen to multiple stories at once, even (and especially) when they contradict each other.  We will find the ways each story helps us understand the next, or perhaps, how our understanding of some stories collapses when we are introduced to a new story. We will talk about science, and we will talk about fictional stories, and we will talk about science fiction stories. Sometimes those will be the same thing, sometimes those will be at odds with each other. But we must remain flexible and willing to push past the pain of hurt egos and changing worldviews.” “Read into the science, and read into the fiction. Read the science as fiction, read the fiction as science. Get playful with your reading practice.”