“To minds that crave binary order, and the simplicity of the male-female dichotomy, the study of gender can lead to despair. They say that women with Y chromosomes and men with two X’s are abnormal. But normal is just a word that gets thrown around when we try to make sense of biology.”
-Scott Fotheringham – The Rest is Silence (Goose Lane Editions, 2012)
“The only choices we have… are to participate in the destruction or do something about it.”
-Scott Fotheringham – The Rest is Silence (Goose Lane Editions, 2012)
“After our birth and before our death, we spin a web of stories so intricate that it’s easy to become tangled within it.”
-Scott Fotheringham – The Rest is Silence (Goose Lane Editions, 2012)
“I know that we are going to destroy the world that holds us. We are savages, treating the Earth like a toilet, fouling our own nest. We all seem to agree on that now… We knew what we were wreaking and it scared us, most of all because we couldn’t see any way of stopping it. So we stick our heads in the sand. The ostrich does this not to become invisible to its foe; it wants to avoid seeing what’s coming for it.”
-Scott Fotheringham – The Rest is Silence (Goose Lane Editions, 2012)
“No cure was worth torturing cats and mice. It was like arguing that inventing, then using, the atom bomb was justified because it ended the war and diminished suffering. Any evil that entered the world contaminated the world.”
-Scott Fotheringham – The Rest is Silence (Goose Lane Editions, 2012)
An editorial on Science and Speculative Fiction By Derek Newman-Stille
Although as a society, we often create an impenetrable barrier between the arts and sciences, seeing each as separate and distinct from one another, these barriers are historically created and are social inventions. The origin of science is through philosophy, remember. Science Fiction (or more widely, Speculative Fiction) is one of the arenas where there are still obvious bridges between the arts and sciences – being a production of artistic endeavor, but also dealing with ideas coming out of technology and sciences.
Several Canadian SF authors including Julie Czerneda, Scott Fotheringham, and Nina Munteanu have operated in the field of science, noticing the opportunity that SF provides to explore critical questions around science. Czerneda has even used science fiction as a mechanism for teaching students about science, allowing them to play out scientific ideas in a science fictional setting.
SF allows authors to explore the social implications of science, the social contexts and ideological underpinnings that accompany scientific endeavors. SF explores the social ramifications of scientific ideas and developments, exploring what could happen, where things could go, what social issues could develop in correspondence with technological invention, seeing the sociocultural aspect of science rather than viewing scientific ideology as separate from the social sphere and divorced from its ideological implications. SF can provide a critical lens to scientific pursuits, providing writers and readers the opportunity to insert the deeper questions into scientific explorations: asking “Why?”, “What happens if…?”, and “What could come from this?”.
So often, scientists are wrapped up in the act of invention, in the process of discovery, that they ignore what the implications of their research could be, how it could be used (and for whom), and how it could be made to serve purposes for which it was not intended. The research for research’s sake mentality sometimes cultivates an ideology that ignores social implications. SF can provide social warnings about where things could go, bringing ideas back into the world and seeing how they could play out within a political, societal sphere.
SF often displays scientific ideas magnified, extremified, exaggerated to illustrate possible implications, highlighting the dangers as well as the potentialities that could be embodied in the process of discovery, and the hazardous places that society could take scientific invention to. SF can be a place to explore moral issues in relation to technology – what are the implications of invention? How will inventions shift our consciousness and the way we view the world? Will we still capture what is fundamentally human if we switch our basic behaviours, our patterns of thought, or even our bodies themselves?
Writers can use SF as a medium for exploring whether the social or the technological will be a greater mechanism of change. Scott Fotheringham’s The Rest is Silence explores whether social change or technological change will be the thing that will deter the destruction of our natural environment and deal with the development of pollutants. Will we be able to shift our way of thinking about the world to be more ecologically safe, or will we once again try to rely on a technological invention to solve our problems?
SF can illustrate the limits of science to repair our social problems. We tend, as a society, to put a lot of faith in the idea that science will solve our problems, whether they be environmental (as illustrated by our trend to introduce new species into ecosystems as an attempt to control those ecosystems) or medical (believing that the medical profession can solve our bodily ills).We often take science as a given solution, as an ideology founded in concepts of “Truth”, rather than a set of theories that is open to challenge and is historically contingent (formed from a specific line of thought that has developed over time). SF provides a space to question the unquestioned authority of science and our social belief that science can solve our world’s ills.
One of the fora of scientific exploration that SF has been doing a great job of critiquing is the field of medicine, and, particularly, the ideologies that are created from viewing the body mechanically (as something that can be fixed through forced normalisation). One of the areas that is most affected by the medicalised ‘normalcy’ forced on bodies is the area of diverse bodies, and people with disabilities, who are often subjected to painful procedures in an attempt to normalise their bodies rather than shifting social ideologies to allow for more diversity and more accessible spaces for diverse bodies. Leah Bobet does a great job of critiquing the medicalised body in her YA novel Above, where she presents readers with a group of individuals who are mutated or bodily different in certain ways (either with crab arms, the ability to transform into a bee, lion feet, or the ability to speak to ghosts) who have escaped from medical facilities that broke their feet, cut off their arms, and subjected them to harsh medical drugs in order to force their bodies to resemble the human ‘norms’. These people created a community called “Safe”, a place of safety away from the “Whitecoats” (doctors, scientists, psychiatrists, and other medical practitioners). The ideas of healing used by the Whitecoats were shaped by the idea that only certain bodies are normal, and any others are threatening and would be changed (even in painful and destructive ways) to represent that norm.
Camille Alexa, in her short story “All Them Pretty Babies” (from OnSpec Vol 24, No 3) takes this idea even further, presenting a future in which the population is limited, and yet, the society that is fighting for its own survival is still willing to cast out those who are bodily different, those mutations that threaten ideas of the normal. Scientists cast bodies out into areas of intense radiation while they try to preserve their ideas of what is and should be human, allowing anyone who deviates from that idea of humanity to rot in radioactive woods.
In Sparkle Hayter’s naked brunch, a doctor tries to medicalise the werewolf. Rather than accepting it as a figure of legend, he ascribes a disease to this different body: “Lycanthropoic Metamorphic Disorder”. He treats these medically diverse bodies as threatening, trying to force the werewolves to pass as human, subjecting them to harsh treatments that lead to chemical addictions and often death in an attempt to have them be more like ‘normal’, ‘regular’ human beings. He and his society deny the possibility that diverse bodies are useful and even necessary in a social system, that this diversity can be healthy.
Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake illustrates the extremes of danger that could be involved in the economicisation of medical technology. Her future is one in which pharmaceutical companies have solved all of the medical problems, but periodically release viral epidemics to spur the social need to buy more advanced cures and spend more money on medical advances to fuel the pharmaceutical industry. She shadows the issues we see in our society now where a great deal is medically possible, but the access to that medical technology is often restricted by wealth, and where often research is focussed on treatment (which is a greater long term investment) than on cures.
Canadian SF can also point out our reliance on technology. Joseph Macchiusi’s The Betelgeuse Oracle shows a world after the release of a massive EM pulse and the challenges of a world without technology. Urban spaces become deserts cut off from the modes of production, and characters have to adapt to a world that is different from the one that suffused their existence since birth. One character is so dependent on his connection to technology and particularly to communications technology and the need to be connected that he carries his dead cell phone everywhere with him and spends precious moments alternating batteries to try to re-activate it. Scott Fotheringham’s The Rest is Silence illustrates the world’s reliance on plastic and the social breakdowns that occur when plastic is removed from our society.
One of the issues with science is that it often limits things into easy (and uncritical) categories (such as binary notions of gender), and good Canadian SF complicates these theories, disrupts this boundaries and categories and shows the complexity of the issues involved. It questions the foundations of categorization altogether.
SF doesn’t just critique scientific endeavours, SF also provides the opportunity for creative thought. So often people become limited in their outlook, navel-gazing within their own field and looking only at what is currently possible instead of what is impossible. Often it is in the sphere of the impossible where new ideas are found, new visions of things, and new ways of considering things outside of what is ‘normal’. Reading and writing SF allows for the development of insights into the impossible, the places of new innovation and new ways of thinking about the world.
SF explores the “what ifs” that are the foundation of scientific hypothesis building.
Science and SF can provide a powerful conversation with each other, changing, questioning, and challenging each other.
Here are some points that SF authors have raised about Science in their Interviews on Speculating Canada:
SCOTT FOTHERINGHAM
(https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2013/03/08/interview-with-scott-fotheringham/ )
Scott Fotheringham: I wanted to use what I had learned of biology to perform a thought experiment: What would happen if plastic began to disappear? Because
Author photo courtesy of Scott Fotheringham
that probably won’t happen because we choose to make it happen, I wondered if organisms could digest plastic.
Scott Fotheringham: “much of science is goal-driven or product-driven. Scientists create things that are worth a lot of money but have little social value or actually harm us.”
Scott Fothertingham: “The questions I’d like to see asked – particularly by the scientists themselves – are, What value does the work I’m doing have to society? How will this be used and, if it has potential for harm, should we pursue the research at all? So often scientists shrug their shoulders and say it’s not up to them how their inventions and discoveries are employed. This is a grievous abdication of their responsibility.”
Scott Fotheringham: “Right now our intention is to use technology to make money. Only if that changes will we able to work to heal what we’ve wrought.”
Scott Fotheringham: “Reading gives us insight into how other people view the world. If all I had was my experience, and that didn’t include reading, my view of how the world works would be narrower than it is.“
JULIE CZERNEDA
(https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2013/02/28/interview-with-julie-czerneda/ )
Julie Czerneda: “From the beginning, to me, biology and science fiction differed in degree, not substance. Biology filled me with wonder and curiosity. All science
Photo of Julie Czerneda by Roger Czerneda
does. The universe does. Reading science fiction did that. Writing it? Ah, there was the legal, moral, and fun way to answer my own questions.”
Julie Czerneda: “what I write, the stories I tell, come from what interests me. So there are cool real bits of biology everywhere in my stuff. I couldn’t make up the weirdness of real life.”
Julie Czerneda: “Because nothing lives in isolation, an ecological approach gives a writer the opportunity to fit the puzzle together. To have alternative points of view and unintended consequences. All the intricate and messy ways things happen.”
Julie Czerneda: “The more the merrier! Or, in the case of living things, the more stable and resilient the community. It’s interactions that interest me. The interface between any two or more creatures is full of change and adaptation and lovely icky bits. In storytelling — and real life — I’d rather toss a problem at a group of people (or whatever I have in mind at the moment) who’ll each have a different approach to a solution, if they see it as a problem at all.”
Julie Czerneda: “I believe, passionately, that science fictional thinking is a crucial survival skill. We all need to ask questions, to speculate about possible consequences in an imaginative, yet as close to real fashion as possible, and to become able to assess incoming information in a critical, not cynical manner. Imagination is of immense use, too often undervalued. We who live and breath SF rarely appreciate what a strong and active muscle our minds have developed. I’d like everyone to have the same advantage. To ride society’s changes, rather than be swept away. To decide where and how technology best fits our needs, before it’s in our homes.”
Julie Czerneda: “I’ve had success using science fiction with students to get them “talking science.” SF provides useful vocabulary, presented in context. Story dialogue gives examples of conversations centred about science as something immediately important to the characters.“
Julie Czerneda: “I’ve also worked with a professor who, for many years now, has used science fiction as an integral part of his first year astronomy course. Students take what they’ve learned about the science and apply it to alien world-building as an SF writer would do it. I’m proud to say this class has been using Beholder’s Eye (my second novel) as part of this process.”
Julie Czerneda: “We need people who can bring science to life, who can clearly express complex ideas in meaningful ways to a varied audience. SF? Does it all the time.”
Julie Czerneda: “What we can’t imagine, we can’t create, so there’s one. What we can’t imagine, we can’t prepare against or for, so that’s another. Imagination is essential to our survival, as individuals and as a species, and has been for eons. The sad thing is that it can atrophy from lack of use or be stunted by those who’ve lost their own. The best? The more it’s used, the stronger it becomes.”
Julie Czerneda: “What technology is to science, I suspect curiosity is to imagination.”
Julie Czerneda: “I take pleasure and pride in what makes science fiction a speculation about the real world, by asking that one “what if …” then building a story framework that lets me play with an answer, while keeping as much of what we know factual and true to life. I’ve no problem inviting a reader to play along with FTL and aliens, but I won’t mess with anything more and there’s always a science question at the heart of my plot. What if life evolved this way or that? How might biological imperatives affect technological civilizations? Who might we become in the future? What cost is too high or risk too great, when manipulating genetics? I love how science fiction gives me insight into these and any other questions I might have.
KARL SCHROEDER
(https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2013/01/23/interview-with-karl-schroeder/ )
Karl Schroeder: “We spend much of our lives programming ourselves to react automatically rather than to think. It’s faster, costs less energy. Part of that process involves the ossification of our basic categories: man/woman, human/nonhuman. SF deliberately blurs these categories in order to almost literally wake us up. It’s strangemaking, which is a very valuable capacity, especially in the present situation when the world needs innovative new solutions to some pretty dire problems. It’s not that SF presents, or even can present, the solutions to big issues like global warming or global poverty; it’s that it helps educate us in the kind of thinking that can lead to them.”
Karl Schroeder: “Realism, in literature, painting, and science, is just the rule of the lowest common denominator. It’s not actually a successful stance in science, for instance; strictly realist approaches to quantum mechanics fall into paradox pretty quickly. Realism achieves some stability in understanding the world by simply discarding 99% of all the available data (whether that be measurements, opinions, or political stances). That’s what the muggles do in the Harry Potter stories… They only think about, and therefore can only see, those things they’ve decided are ‘real.’ What’s that saying? “If all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” That’s muggle thinking.”
Karl Schroeder: “There’s lots of technologies that are flashy, or might have this or that big effect on the world. Nuclear fusion, augmented reality, nanotech… yeah, they’re all great. But we don’t need them. There’s only one development that we need at this point in our history: better methods and systems for decision-making, both individual and collective.”
Karl Schroeder: “We have all the technologies—all the tools and capabilities and understandings—to create a Utopia on Earth now. We can absolutely solve the problem of global warming, for instance; we even know how to reverse it with technologies we currently possess. What’s become abundantly clear in the past couple of decades is that the only thing we lack is the ability to make, and follow-through on, the right decisions. So much of my work right now is dedicated to asking what we need to do to get to such capabilities.”
Karl Schroeder: “Do you imagine or write a future where anything is possible except the invention of prostheses to compensate for the inadequacies of human decision-making? Does your worldbuilding encompass universes with star flight, robots and nanotech—yet accept royalty, corporations and bureaucracies as inevitable?”
NINA MUNTEANU
(https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2012/11/27/interview-with-nina-munteanu/ )
Nina Munteanu: “The literature of the fantastic: speculative literature, science fiction, fantasy… explore—nay—celebrate and bridge the gap between logic and
Author photo courtesy of Nina Munteanu
imagination, the mundane and the extraordinary, the known and the strange, order and infinite possibility.”
Nina Munteanu: “Speculative fiction predicts consequence to current conditions. It projects into the future or alternate reality from current paradigms in science, technology and society. Speculative fiction uses the premise, “What if?”: “What if this continued?” “What if we used that this way?”; “What if this caused that?”. It provides the proverbial “canary in the mine” on society. Where realist fiction makes commentary on our current society, speculative fiction takes that commentary into the realm of consequence by showing it to us in living colour. It is the ghost of future, present and past to our Scrooge. The arm of speculative fiction reaches far. This is its power over realist fiction and why, I think, mainstream realist authors like Margaret Atwood have discovered and embraced this genre (her latest three books are all speculative fiction). Speculative fiction doesn’t just “tell us”; it can “show us”.”
Nina Munteanu: “Both ecology and science fiction explore consequence in a big way.”
Nina Munteanu: “My ecological interests and experiences have influenced my writing in every way: in providing me with ideas, in world-building, and in the interactive fractal nature of plot, theme, character and premise. For me, the two are intertwined. Writing science fiction has opened the doors of creative problem solving in my scientific pursuits; and my science has opened windows of possibilities in my writing. It’s a win-win situation, really.”
Nina Munteanu: “Most science and technology presents itself in literature through premise or plot, which influence various characters in their life journeys. Ecology—like setting—manifests and integrates itself more in theme. This is because, while most of the hard sciences study the nature and behavior of “phenomena”, ecology studies the consequences of the relationship of these phenomena and the impact of their behaviors on each other and the rest of the “world”.”
Nina Munteanu: “Environmental issues are largely a global phenomenon—concerns like water quality and quantity, air pollution, resource acquisition, allocation and sharing, wildlife extinction, etc. Science fiction is the literature of consequence that explores large issues faced by humankind; it can provide an important vehicle in raising environmental awareness. Literature in general has always served as a cultural reporter on themes important to humanity….The science fiction genre—and speculative fiction particularly—explores premise based on current scientific and technological paradigms. What if we kept doing this?…What if that went on unchecked?… What if we decided to end this?… These are conveyed through the various predictive visions from cautionary tales (e.g., Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake”) to dystopias (e.g., Huxley’s “Brave New World”).
JEROME STUEART
(https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2012/12/18/interview-with-jerome-stueart/ )
Jerome Stueart: “Speculation is about seeing natural consequences, about thinking about choices and figuring out where they will lead, and about large-scale
Author photo courtesy of Jerome Stueart
societal consequences. I think speculative fiction is the reason we don’t condone cloning, or have nuclear war—science fiction showed us that there are no good ways of having those, and we believed them.”
Jerome Stueart: ““I would put MORE speculative literature in the classroom…. I would teach kids to imagine their own futures—what will they be doing 20 years from now, and what will society be like. What do they WANT society to be like? And where do they see the forces in control trying to lead us? Kids can be taught to think speculatively and use it wisely. “
Jerome Stueart: “I think SF can help us get ready for change, and see change as positive and desirable. We get in our ruts. If we want the Star Trek universe—we’re gonna have to work for it. LOL. But I think it can examine multiple paths for us—examining all possible scenarios and showing us a positive path.
Jerome Stueart: “Maybe that’s the greatest strength of SF—it has a wide angled lens. SF is about commenting on societal problems more than character problems. Maybe that’s why the characters can be more universal, and sometimes flatter, because SF is interested in the “what if” of the story—the what if of the society. It can handle a universal character because the society is what we want to examine in SF, and the choices a society makes.”
Jerome Stueart: “I think the current problems with getting the world to understand climate change is directly related to an inability to speculate—or see the future from the evidence you have. Society has equipped scientists to extrapolate from their research, but we don’t take their recommendations because we don’t trust science anymore, or intelligence. Unless the majority of the population respects knowledge, has a healthy speculative mind, they can’t see consequences.”
DOUGLAS SMITH
(https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2012/10/06/interview-with-douglas-smith/ )
Douglas Smith: “That’s the power of SF and fantasy (and I’d put SF as a specific subset of fantasy)–there are fewer (no?) limitations to the types of stories that I 
can tell.”
Douglas Smith: “If there is a social issue that a writer wishes to explore and bring attention to, speculative fiction provides the freedom through its “distorted mirror” to let a writer bring whatever focus they desire to that issue.”
An Interview with Scott Fotheringham
Author photo courtesy of Scott Fotheringha
By Derek Newman-Stille
This was a great interview to follow up with our interview of Julie Czerneda since Scott Fotheringham also has a background in biology and has experienced both the worlds of science and Canadian fiction authorship. I have been pondering the relationship between speculative fiction writing and science for some time, and have enjoyed this opportunity to talk with authors whose fiction broaches the speculative.
Spec Can: You were a molecular biologist before becoming an SF author. What was the transition like? How do you straddle the worlds between academia and fiction authorship?
Scott Fotheringham: It seems like such a long time ago that I was a research scientist. I’ve done a lot of things since then that had little to do with science. I have learned to cook at restaurants and for large groups, I worked as an organic gardener, I spent five years working in the mental health field in Halifax, and now I do PR for arts and technology companies.
The transition was clunky at the beginning because I went straight from a career path in academia to working as a short-order cook in a vegetarian restaurant. Because so much of how I self-identify is through my work, it wasn’t always easy. I’m glad I left research science, but I do miss aspects of it. It’s so interesting and stimulating.
I don’t really straddle those two worlds. It was more of having both feet in academia years ago and now having one foot in fiction writing and the other devoted to everything else.
Spec Can: What inspired you to change careers from being a scientist to being an author of fiction?
Scott Fotheringham: I left science for reasons that are still not completely clear to me. I think it’s a tricky business to look backward and analyze how we made decisions in our lives. All I know is that I wasn’t happy spending most of my time in a lab and that I didn’t see what I was doing as socially relevant. It was interesting, to be sure. That, and I wanted to live closer to the ground, possibly near a lot of trees.
Spec Can: In what ways can biology inform Science Fiction?
Scott Fotheringham: I wanted to use what I had learned of biology to perform a thought experiment: What would happen if plastic began to disappear? Because that probably won’t happen because we choose to make it happen, I wondered if organisms could digest plastic. I went looking in the literature for references to bacteria and fungi that ate plastic and found them. From there it was a matter of perfecting the process, setting it loose, and watching what happened.
I loved reading Frankenstein because of how contemporary it feels. Shelley could have written that today about a genetically engineered organism. All the details and philosophical passages in that book are relevant to questions we have today about the worth of genetic engineering.
Spec Can: As a scientist yourself, you do an excellent job of bringing critical attention to some issues in scientific discourse. What were some questions about science that you hoped to raise for readers when you wrote The Rest is Silence?
Scott Fotheringham: The research scientists I admired most were those who were doing it because they loved to discover the mysteries of life. That was one reason to do science. It is quite a thrill to discover something about the world that nobody else has ever seen.
Then, there are scientists who are trying to solve a problem. Cure or find treatments for disease, develop a cheaper water pump for developing nations, or breed a drought-resistant crop.
However, much of science is goal-driven or product-driven. Scientists create things that are worth a lot of money but have little social value or actually harm us.
The questions I’d like to see asked – particularly by the scientists themselves – are, What value does the work I’m doing have to society? How will this be used and, if it has potential for harm, should we pursue the research at all? So often scientists shrug their shoulders and say it’s not up to them how their inventions and discoveries are employed. This is a grievous abdication of their responsibility.
Spec Can: In The Rest is Silence you bring a lot of attention to society’s need for easy categories and particularly binaries like male/female that limit our
Cover photo of The Rest is Silence courtesy of the publisher
understanding of the world. Why are limited categories so damaging and how can SF help us to resist applying outmoded and limited categories?
Scott Fotheringham: Lao Tzu says, “In naming is the origin of all particular things.” Once we’ve named something, we can feel that we understand it and can ignore it. Often, for example, I can see a bird, identify it, and not pay any more attention to it. Imagine the world of wonder if we don’t do that, if we follow that nuthatch and see how it forages, where it lives, how it flies.
The same can be said for something like gender. It’s too easy to divide the world into male and female and ignore the wealth of experience that comes from seeing that gender is fluid and expansive. Realizing that allows me to explore who I am more deeply. A wonderful example is Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Here’s a book that lets you think about a world in which the gender binary doesn’t exist. What does that say about love?
Spec Can: Obsession plays a large role in the Rest is Silence. How did ideas about obsession inspire you and shape your novel?
Scott Fotheringham: I have a somewhat obsessive personality. In small ways and in large ones. Unfortunately, one of my obsessions is with getting this life thing right. Like Benny, I strive to improve, I strive to make things better. Of course, this is fallacious thinking as the world is perfect as it is and doesn’t need me to fix it. But that’s a hard lesson to incorporate. I hope to accept that by the time I’m eighty.
Spec Can: The Rest is Silence tackles the issue of social versus technological means of dealing with pollution. Which do you think is going to have a more significant impact?
Scott Fotheringham: Can I say both? Only once we agree that the pollution problem needs to be addressed and that the natural world is our primary concern – more than economic growth, more than standard of living, more than our comfort – will we see a change. Then, we can safely apply both social and technological means because our intention will be clear. Right now our intention is to use technology to make money. Only if that changes will we able to work to heal what we’ve wrought.
Spec Can: What inspired you to write about an intersexed person?
Scott Fotheringham: I don’t know. Partly it comes from caring about underdogs.
Spec Can: What inspired you to write about a world without plastic?
Scott Fotheringham: I thought it would be fun to imagine such a world, and it was.
Spec Can: In what ways can SF and fiction writing in general change social perceptions and ideas? How can SF help readers to think outside the box and question things?
Scott Fotheringham: Reading gives us insight into how other people view the world. If all I had was my experience, and that didn’t include reading, my view of how the world works would be narrower than it is.
Spec Can: Are there any other thoughts or ideas that you would be interested in sharing with readers?
Scott Fotheringham: I’m thinking about the tar sands a lot these days. They are a good example of how our goals are primarily economic and comfort-related. If our children and grandchildren look at pictures of the tar sands fifty years from now are they going to thank us for digging up all that bitumen? Will their quality of life be better because we are destroying a large part of Alberta?
I want to thank Scott Fotheringham for this great discussion and for raising a lot of questions in our minds about science and the current devastating effects that economic ideas are having on the environment. You can explore his website at http://scottfotheringham.blogspot.ca/ to find out more about him and his current projects.
“Don’t voice your ideas if you don’t want them realized.”
-Scott Fotheringham – The Rest is Silence (Goose Lane Editions, 2012)
This is a great interview to follow the interview with Julie Czerneda. Join Speculating Canada on Friday March 8 to hear another scientist who has turned to fiction writing discuss their ideas, thoughts, and inspirations.
Author photo courtesy of Scott Fotheringham
Scott Fotheringham is a former molecular biologist who is currently a fiction author. Although he does not identify as an author of SF, much of his fiction work has speculative elements in it that should excite you. Scott discusses ways that science can change to be more understanding of the impact of scientific endeavors, breaking down binary gender categories, the moral implications of science, developing fiction from thought experiments, and the importance of protecting our environment.
Here are some teasers for our upcoming interview:
Scott Fotheringham: “I left science for reasons that are still not completely clear to me.”
Scott Fotheringham: “I wanted to use what I had learned of biology to perform a thought experiment: What would happen if plastic began to disappear? Because that probably won’t happen because we choose to make it happen, I wondered if organisms could digest plastic. I went looking in the literature for references to bacteria and fungi that ate plastic and found them. From there it was a matter of perfecting the process, setting it loose, and watching what happened.”
Scott Fotheringham: “The questions I’d like to see asked – particularly by the scientists themselves – are, What value does the work I’m doing have to society? How will this be used and, if it has potential for harm, should we pursue the research at all? So often scientists shrug their shoulders and say it’s not up to them how their inventions and discoveries are employed. This is a grievous abdication of their responsibility.”
Scott Fotheringham: “It’s too easy to divide the world into male and female and ignore the wealth of experience that comes from seeing that gender is fluid and expansive.”
Scott Fotheringham: “Only once we agree that the pollution problem needs to be addressed and that the natural world is our primary concern – more than economic growth, more than standard of living, more than our comfort – will we see a change.”
Scott Fotheringham: “Reading gives us insight into how other people view the world.”
Like many Canadian authors who write about speculative topics, Scott Fotheringham raises questions for readers to ponder and consider. If you haven’t had a chance yet, you can read my review of Scott Fotheringham’s The Rest is Silence at https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2013/02/13/loss-and-changes/ .
Some Book Club Discussion Questions for Scott Fotheringham’s “The Rest is Silence”
Cover photo of The Rest is Silence courtesy of the publisher
In “The Rest is Silence”, the narrator plays a game with his/her father where they imagine a world without various items. Think of an item and envision what the world would be like without it.
What questions or concerns did this book bring up for you about science and the way science works?
Would this book work well as a movie? Why or why not?
How does obsession feature in this book? How does it shape these characters? What influences their obsessions?
What were you most surprised contained plastic? What surprised you about what the plastic-eating-bacteria effected?
Scott Fotheringham talks about how the environment can be changed by either social change (i.e. a change in the behaviour people show toward the environment or their attitude) or technological change (i.e. a new technological creation that changes environmental conditions). Which do you think is more likely to be most successful in reducing pollution – technology or changes in society’s attitude about waste?
Benny compares herself to Dr. Frankenstein at several points in the narrative. How is she like Dr. Frankenstein? How is her bacteria like Frankenstein’s monster?
How would you adapt to living in a world without plastic?
This book raises a lot of questions about gender and identity, what did you think about the gender questions?
Speculating Canada: Canadian Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy 