Summer Reading List 2021

Josh Landy
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy, we’re coming to you from our respective living rooms via the studios of KALW San Francisco.

Ray Briggs
continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus, where I teach philosophy, and Josh directs the Philosophy and Literature initiative.

Josh Landy
Today, it’s our annual summer reading list. And what a difference a year makes.

Ray Briggs
No kidding. We’ll check in with our Stanford colleague, Michaela Bronstein, who talked to us last year about how fiction and narrative could help us through the pandemic.

Josh Landy
And as we gingerly move into a life beyond COVID, we’ll talk to science fiction writer Cory Doctorow, who has a story in a new collection called “Make Shift: Dispatches from the Post-Pandemic Future.”

Ray Briggs
We’ll also ask St. Louis University philosopher Helen De Cruz, about the collection that she edited this year, “Philosophy Through Science Fiction Stories: Exploring the Boundaries of the Possible.”

Josh Landy
But to get us started, we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter Holly J. McDede to find out how poets read, created, and connected over the past year. She files this report.

Holly McDede
Sarah Kobrinsky is the former Poet Laureate of Emeryville, California. During the pandemic, she turned to folktales.

Sarah Kobrinsky
At the very beginning of the pandemic, maybe the first few months, every day, we would light a campfire and just read old school folk tales around the campfire just trying to keep our kid engaged. You know, here he was stuck with his boring parents, you know, all day, and so trying to keep him off a screen, trying to keep him you know, his wild mind alive.

Holly McDede
Kobrinsky also followed a project from the San Francisco Public Library where one poem was showcased every day. The program featured one of her own poems titled “A poem for John Who Writes in Elevens.” It’s about John Oliver Simon, a beloved Bay Area poet and teacher.

Sarah Kobrinsky
There are 11 syllables in this line. 11:11 my dear, make a wish. This is also a Dear John letter, John, but not that kind of a Dear John letter, John. I just wanted to feel your form. Try you on, count and count again the stars in Joseph’s stream. Did you see any stars when you were under? Are you any lighter now that growth is gone? Once I heard of a man who kept his tumor on his mantle, in a jar next to his wife, he wished on it like on a star called John.

Craig Santos Perez
My poem is titled “The Lesson.” It’s written on June 1, 2020.

Holly McDede
Craig Santos Perez is a poet and professor at the University of Hawaii. Feeling short on time, he often wrote sonnets. He tried to write a poem a day.

Craig Santos Perez
What if the pandemic is trying to teach us how to stop discriminating? My wife and daughter both suffer from asthma. So I was really worried about their health. I was watching the news, national news, and seeing protests around the US, seeing a lot of cops arresting, you know, mostly peaceful protesters witnessing the violence happening, especially against African Americans. And so to me, you know, thinking a lot about how, you know, scientists were saying that the virus does not discriminate, where it attacks everyone equally.

Sakinah Hofler
What Contagion got wrong about a pandemic in America, written after the third time of watching it since the start of 2020.

Holly McDede
Sakinah Hofler is a poet, playwright, and fiction writer. In 2020, she learned she was pregnant, her sister was working in a COVID-19 unit, her parents caught the disease, she found herself in a fog.

Sakinah Hofler
War conspiracy theories as an democratic hoax as an sorrows as an manmade as in labs as in 5G as in towers. The conspiracy theorists using conspiracy theories from conspiracy theorists who corroborate conspiracy theories for the conspiracy theorists, the right way to write, I am so sorry for your loss. I am so sorry for your loss. I am so sorry for your loss. For me, at least like fiction has always been a way of telling me history. And so it is our like, our job in order to kind of record what’s going on. I couldn’t write for myself, but I kept saying, okay, well, if my son is born, I’m no longer here. We’ll have something of mine like he can hear my words and he can hear what I observed while he was in my stomach and he can learn what the world was like before and after COVID. When I say poetry is magic reading is magic and it’s, you know, it carries us to places. Sometimes we need to be when our own reality is too much for us to cope with. The correct number of times to start a poem and never finish the right way to write. I, am so sorry for your loss. The credit as in a spect, an ending.

Holly McDede
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede.

Ray Briggs
Thanks, Holly, for that rhapsodic report on rhythm and rhyme. I’m Ray Briggs, with me is my Stanford colleague, Josh Landy. And today we’re compiling our annual summer reading list.

Josh Landy
A little over a year ago as the pandemic took hold, we spoke to Michaela Bronstein, our colleague in the Stanford English department about the value of fiction, stories and storytelling to help us cope with anxious times.

Ray Briggs
A year later, we thought we’d check in with her to find out what she was reading now that things are opening up. Michaela, welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

Michaela Bronstein
Thanks for having me. It’s nice to hear you all again.

Josh Landy
So Michaela last summer, you very helpfully explained to us how we can put reading to the service of getting through the pandemic. So I’ve got to ask, how did that work out for you?

Michaela Bronstein
Well, if I, if I remember correctly, I think I talked a lot last year about literature that engaged with the possibility of massive historical change, and radical departures from the past as something we might find useful for getting through the pandemic. And I have to say, at the moment, I’m feeling that literature may be more helpful to kind of measuring the massive inertia of the ongoing present, both within the pandemic and right now as we all return to sociability. I will soon be teaching Mrs. Dalloway and the kind of atmosphere of the opening up of a party and the newness of it, is something that feels very relevant to me right now in a different way than I was talking about last year.

Ray Briggs
And so what have you been reading recently, Michaela?

Michaela Bronstein
I just finished the Richard Wright novel, “The Man Who Lived Underground,” which was published about a month ago, but written about 80 years ago at this point. It’s a novel that was rejected by publishers during Wright’s lifetime, probably in part because it very explicitly treats police brutality and torture to elicit a false confession and Wright published a novella version of it during during his own lifetime, but only just this year, do we have access to the something like the full novel he intended.

Josh Landy
So because can you tell us a little bit more about this novel?

Michaela Bronstein
Yeah, so “The Man Who Lived Underground” is about a black man named Fred Daniels, who is picked up by the police. They they think he’s committed a heinous murder. He has not. He is tortured until he gives a false confession. He eventually escapes the police and winds up in the sewers, where he explores a variety of places from the sewers that he’s able to get access to, including a morgue, various businesses, a church and a film theater. And eventually while he’s down in the sewers, he comes to a different way of viewing the world.

Ray Briggs
That also sounds really similar to a lot of the things that happen in Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man.

Michaela Bronstein
Absolutely. And, you know, I think people have made some connections between the between the texts before. But the novel version, the new one really makes that much more explicit. Fred Daniels sort of describes himself as invisible, in sort of extended ways. And also the The Man Who Lived Underground and Invisible Man, both owe something to Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. And Ellison and Wright were friends. So the connection is very solid.

Josh Landy
But it’s interesting because it’s almost as though this novel was sort of, I mean, Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man came later. If you read them out of order you almost think this one is a critique of Invisible Man because Fred Daniels thought foolishly he could walk right on past the man as though he were kind of ghost. And then the sheer reality of it came to him. He was real and so was this man, That’s a very different vision of race relations in America.

Michaela Bronstein
But you know, what’s interesting in the book is what struck me as the kind of one of the strongest points of comparison is that both Invisible, the protagonist of Ellison’s novel and Fred Daniels, keep at the beginning, keep on expecting the world to work out. So Fred Daniels thinks oh, he’ll just put provide an explanation to the police and they’ll let him go because he’s innocent. And Daniels is much quicker than Invisible to learn otherwise. It takes invisible, you know, hundreds of pages to figure out that actually no the world will not be just to him. Fred Daniels, as he, you know, in part because of the extreme physical brutality he suffers, once he enters the sewers, starts thinking in a dramatically different way.

Josh Landy
That brings me to another motif in this novel, which is the motif of religion. WYoumentioned quite rightly, that is a character, Fred Daniels, in Richard Wright’s “The Man Who Lived Underground” who, who expects things to go the way of justice and reasonableness. And of course they don’t, because the the highly racist society he’s living in is massively unjust. And then, of course, he encounters a group of very devout religious believers, and has a kind of conversion experience, you want to talk a little bit about that?

Michaela Bronstein
Well, I think just to set the scene a little bit, Wright actually intended the novel to be published with an essay, Memories of My Grandmother, which describes this whole novel as an attempt to capture her Seventh Day Adventist view of the world in which the world is simply less real than God’s truth, which is not quite in the world. And what Wright is trying to do in this novel is just the way he tells it is to capture that viewpoint in the person of what happens to Daniels, the world becomes unreal to him once he enters the sewers, but without doing it precisely through the theology of Adventism. And so when he encounters people who are praying and singing in the church, he sort of looks at them through the lens of his own strange relation to the world produced by the false accusation and, and torture, which is, he recognizes in them, this sense of a kind of inchoate guilt, that in his view, everybody is feeling everybody is guilty of something. And also everybody is innocent at the same time.

Ray Briggs
I was curious about like, whether it was possible to evaluate this sense of detachment that Daniels is feeling, like he leaves his family behind, including his pregnant wife. And this seems maybe kind of inevitable, given the circumstances, but also kind of, I don’t know that I love it morally.

Michaela Bronstein
Yeah, not just pregnant, I believe she’s, she’s actually giving birth near the beginning of the novel.

Josh Landy
Yeah, and doesn’t Wright say in his discussion of the story, take it as an indictment of religion, if you will. Use it connect that sudden callousness on Fred Daniels’ part of part of the main character, with his turn to religion.

Michaela Bronstein
Yeah, so it all it’s also an indictment, it is in part because it’s an indictment of religion, it’s also, that is part of the indictment of the American criminal justice system, which, by dint of accusing people of having committed crimes, renders them in some way guilty. And that’s clearly what’s happening to Daniels is that he, first of all, he kind of feels this sort of sense of guilt that he can’t erase, even though he knows he’s actually innocent. And he starts committing crimes, some of which have terrible consequences. You know, he steals things from these various businesses that he’s able to access. And then he witnesses other people being accused of the crimes that he has, in fact, committed, one of whom, upon being accused kills himself. So I don’t think Wright is praising this detachment, in part, because what he’s saying is that this is one of the terrible consequences of the life that Black Americans have to live every day.

Ray Briggs
So Michaela, “The Man Who Lived Underground” is just available now for people to read. But is there a reason why it’s especially relevant reading for this summer?

Michaela Bronstein
Well, I think the the line in every headline about the novel has been accurate, that it’s a novel about police brutality, and it suddenly seems well, not that suddenly, but I think it arrives at a moment where people are really looking at the long history of law enforcement abuse of Black Americans. And this novel, which starts with that upfront, and then uses that as a jumping off point for a much broader consideration of Black religion and many other kind of textures of experience seems to me very timely.

Josh Landy
Well Michaela, this has been a wonderful conversation about a fantastic book. Thanks so much for joining us again.

Michaela Bronstein
Thank you for having me. It’s great to talk.

Ray Briggs
Michaela Bronstein from Stanford University on Richard Wright’s “The Man Who Lived Underground.” You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. And today, we’re putting together our annual summer reading.

Josh Landy
Coming up, we’ll ask science fiction writer Cory Doctorow about “Dispatches from the Post-Pandemic Future.” And philosopher Helen De Cruz, about “Exploring the Boundaries of the Possible.”

Ray Briggs
Thought provoking reading for a post pandemic summer, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, and it’s our annual summer reading show. I’m Josh Landy and I’m here with my Stanford colleague, Ray Briggs.

Ray Briggs
We’re not done with COVID yet. But now that there’s a vaccine, it’s a good time to take stock of the present and imagine new possibilities for the future. And what better way to expand our imaginations than with science fiction?

Josh Landy
Cory Doctorow is a journalist and science fiction writer whose story Making Hay is included a brand new anthology that’s on our summer reading list. It’s called “Make Shift: Dispatches from a Post-Pandemic Future.” Cory, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Cory Doctorow
It is my pleasure to be on Philosophy Talk.

Ray Briggs
So Cory, tell us a little bit about Make Shift and how it came to exist.

Cory Doctorow
Well, I mean, you probably have to ask Gideon Litchfield to get a definitive answer on how that story came into existence. He is an editor at MIT Press. They have, it seems, made this part of a long running series that I’m quite fond of, Twelve Tomorrows’ series that originally Bruce Sterling edited several volumes of and other people have edited volumes of it. There are these science fiction anthologies that would come out in a kind of pulp digest format, and kind of old school to regular subscribers, but also available as a standalone, and they publish some pretty groundbreaking fiction in those. And I think, at the start of the crisis, I mean, my bird’s eye, worm’s eye view of it is at the start of the crisis, Gideon cancelled a feature I was writing for him because it was irrelevant, because now there was a plague. And he said, but as a consolation prize, would you like to write a short story about what life might be like after the plague is over, what futures we might have on our horizon. And so I was working on a novel called The Lost Cause that I have just turned into my editor, I just turned in two novels, to my editor and a nonfiction book to another editor, it’s been a very productive plague for me. It turns out that anxiety makes me work. So I was working on this novel called The Lost Cause. And I decided that I would flesh out the world by writing a short story set in that world, or using one of the minor characters. And it was, I think, successful enough that Gideon bought it. And I, I’m very happy with how the novels turned out to so it was a great kind of peripheral activity for a main activity that I was already working on.

Ray Briggs
So your universe seems really optimistic to me, I have to say, so in your story Making Hay, we’ve got a young person who travels to San Juan Capistrano to take part in a really well organized economy that’s addressing the problems of climate change.

Cory Doctorow
Yeah, it’s funny that you call it optimistic because the premise of the story and of the world indeed, is that we don’t head off climate change, that the polar caps are going to melt, we’re going to lose every coastal city in the world, we will confront multiple genetic plagues that will kill hundreds of millions of people. And yet, I agree, it is an optimistic story. And it’s an optimistic story, not because all of those things aren’t going to happen. But because we confront them head on. That I think that a lot of the sense of despair from today’s looming climate emergency is the sense that we’re like, in the backseat of a bus, and the bus is barreling towards a canyon, and the driver won’t turn the wheel. And you know, we know if the driver turns the wheel, the bus is gonna roll and a bunch of us are gonna break our legs and smash your teeth out and whatever. But we also know that if the, if the driver doesn’t turn the wheel, we’re all gonna die. And this is a novel about people seizing the wheel, about confronting the long, significant, almost unimaginable challenge that faces us and saying, you know, we’re gonna eat this elephant one bite at a time. And you know, that includes doing things like relocating every coastal city 20 kilometers inland over the next 200 years.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, that was that was why I called it optimistic because people coordinate and get it together and do things like stop working when their solar panels aren’t catching the sun instead of spending a bunch of fossil fuel to work, they don’t do sort of things just because they’ve been told to but they actually think about, will this contribute to climate change? And will this like, help us solve the problems that we’ve created? So that seemed-

Cory Doctorow
As a civilization, we spent a lot more time organizing our labor to the rhythms of the sun than we did trying to replace the sun when it wasn’t shining. And the reason the story is called “Making Hay” is because you make hay when the sun shines. And the idea that you could use this stuff that we have all around us, this coordinated networking stuff, to find stuff to do, right, just, you know, the real reason that we all take our weekend on the weekend, and that we all work from nine to five, and so on is the least worst way to coordinate all of our efforts. You know, if you take a week off work and your spouse doesn’t, you know, I did that this year, it’s fine, right, but it’s not a holiday. And what this does is it becomes a kind of Tinder style matching app not for sexual partners, although people do that too. But for people to play a pickup game of football in the park or people to, you know, cook a big old dinner, and you know, it extends out through the world. So one of the things they’ve done is replaced high carbon aviation with low carbon zeppelins because zeppelins are cool and I write science fiction novels. And and the zeppelins go, wherever the wind is blowing, you don’t know where you’re going when you get in the zeppelin. But as soon as you find out the app will tell you who’s there, right, it’ll figure out who you know, your second cousins, old high school pal is there and they’ve got a sofa to crash on. And here’s the seven things you’ll enjoy doing. And here’s 15 other people are going to be in town at the same time as you who you probably get along with, you just get to try it out. And, you know, that is, in many ways more luxurious, right, than the rigid alarm clock that goes off every morning at eight and then or six, and then you know, having to sit down and eat your dinner at seven because you need to be in bed by 9:30 because your alarm clock is going to go off the next morning. Having a more improvisational fluid style that that is characteristic of mobile applications that we have today. Why wouldn’t we extend that to all forms of leisure and work?

Josh Landy
So we’ve talked about the optimism of this story, which I’m- yeah, I love the story. And I love the optimism. But there’s another side of it that I appreciate equally, which is maybe we could call it realism. Your central character Willmar has this, you know, beautiful moving line, I’m supposed to be unafraid of the future, the first fear-free generation in this century. But I’m so scared all the time. He sort of lingering post traumatic after effects that seem really true to our moment. Can you say a little bit about that?

Cory Doctorow
Sure. Yeah, excuse me. The world of the story is set after a successful Green New Deal that comes about through a kind of remarkable series of coincidences, kind of threads, this really improbable needle that gets us there. And part of the the political movement that makes it possible is this slogan that we will create the first generation in a century that won’t have to feel the fear of the future. It’s a very powerful idea. I mean, I’ve got a 13 year old and I’m afraid of the future on her behalf as well as my own. And the idea of freedom from fear is something that animates people quite a lot. But freedom from fear is easier to promise than to deliver. I mean, I think we saw a lot of that in the Trump years, right? Where there was this promise that you would no longer have to fear the nebulous terrors of the Fox News [unintelligible], right. You know, and none of that actually emerged. People are traumatized, right. The reason people want to be free of fear is that they’re living through trauma, and removing the trauma doesn’t remove the damage of the trauma. And in some ways, and this is a thing that the novel grapples with as well, being told that your generational identity is that you don’t feel fear of the future means that when you feel that fear, it becomes a kind of shameful secret.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re talking to Cory Doctorow about his story, “Making Hay,” part of the anthology, “Make Shift: Dispatches from the Post-Pandemic Future.”

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I was really interested in some of the generational stuff in the story. There’s also an older character, who the emotion I associate with her is grief for all the things that she is lost in this effort to relocate her city, because her home is underwater now. You know, one of the things that I kind of want to happen but I don’t think will happen is that we can have a green world where nobody has to give anything up. And I feel like that’s unrealistic, but I still want it.

Cory Doctorow
So look, we can give up a lot of things that we all feel glad about in retrospect, even if we romanticize them. You know, I am a homeowner of a modest three bedroom home in Burbank, California. And about once a month, I need to make a hole in a wall. And so I have a drill. And because I only need to make a hole once a month, I have bought the minimum viable drill just like all of my neighbors. And it occupies an enormous amount of space in a drawer right beside me. And the fact that it doesn’t shower me with white hot trapnell every time I make a hole is really quite a remarkable thing, given what a terrible piece of equipment it is. And this idea that we will all own our own drills and that we all own our own cars, and that we all own our own, you know, lawn mowers and other things that we use seasonally or rarely. That’s not really a luxury right? The luxury part of it is that it’s deterministic, I can always lay hands on the drill, the unluxurious part is that it occupies a lot of space. And it’s a terrible drill. And you could imagine something that the “Seriously Wrong” podcast at British Columbia they call it library socialism, where you have these highly networked objects that know where they are, that know how they’re used, that know how to send in telemetry that lets the next set of the objects like them be met better made that circulate in abundance that you know, you get the best of both worlds, you get the greatest possible drill, and you don’t have to keep it in your house when you’re done with it. But there is going to be like a real sense of loss, people are gonna miss stuff that objectively wasn’t great. And they’re going to associate that loss with the trauma that resulted in its disappearance. You know, I am the grandson of a war refugee. My grandmother was 12 years old during the siege of Leningrad and for three years, worked in the Civil Defense Corps, you know, hauling corpses and bringing ammunition up to the lines and digging trenches, and so on until she was evacuated across the winter ice and inducted into the Red Army. And my grandmother had a kind of romantic longing for her girlhood, even though it was objectively terrible that was mixed with the trauma of her girlhood and it was all mixed up with the fact that she became an exile when she came to Canada because of the Cold War and 15 years went by before she saw her family again. And you know, all of that stuff kind of swirls around. And, you know, at the cozy apocalypse genre, the John Wyndham stories, the stories like “On the Beach” by Nevil Shute that were in vogue after the war in the UK, were all stories about middle class people missing the time when working class people knew their place. You know, Nevil Shute writes a lot about his mom, not being able to walk into our favorite shop anymore without being sort of elbowed aside by like some working class boys who had gotten above their station. And you know, those those cozy apocalypses were full of good middle class people going to ground at a time in which all of the unnecessary that were eliminated by comets or radiation or man eating plants or whatever. And, and where they could then emerge as the true lords of creation they were always destined to be with just enough for [unintelligible] and tugging pearls around to kind of take care of them, you know that that’s always going to be in our story.

Josh Landy
So we’ve talked about the we’ve talked about the optimistic elements of your story. And we’ve talked a little bit about the realist, you know, got a bullet biting side of it. One other thing I wanted to ask you about is a kind of really beautiful, intermediate mood that’s captured by another of the characters called Teresa, who talks about pretending. But you know, she knows that we’re going to need more than just gumption, we’re going to need hope, and we might need more hope than is strictly warranted. So that’s where I wonder whether the science fiction can do some work, like, you know, just imagining this kind of optimistic future is, you know, helping us to fake it till we make it.

Cory Doctorow
Well, it’s a it’s a very Daniel Dennett-ish idea, right that you can have this intuition pump where you can rehearse what a barbaric response to tragedy would be and what a noble response to tragedy would be, and you can rehearse it in your mind. And then when the moment arrives, you know, just like someone who’s, you know, done their fire drills and knows when they smell smoke, that you run straight for the fire exit without even having to think about it, which is, you know, it’s hard to think rationally when the smoke is in your room. You know, that when the crisis arrives, if we’ve all had our intuition pumps primed by stories of nobility that begets you know, that rips victory from the jaws of defeat, then we can be those noble people when that moment arrives. And you know, contrary-wise the cheap dystopia you know, where you have man versus man and man versus nature as a twofer where the, you know, tsunami blows your house down and then your neighbors come over and eat you. That primes your pump for exactly the wrong thing, right, for the idea that when like when the, when the crisis hits instead of having the background hum of the of the petty grievance stop and having that ringing clarity where you realize you should really go and dig your neighbour out of the rubble, that’s, you know, other if you’ve read too much of those cheap apocalypses that’s when you run for your shotgun convinced that your neighbor isn’t going to come over with a covered dish, but you know, with a knife and fork.

Ray Briggs
So Cory, we’ve really enjoyed talking to you about your story in this anthology. I wonder if you have any other reading recommendations for our listeners.

Cory Doctorow
Yeah, I read an awful lot. And and the book that I have sitting on my shelf that I’ve been really looking forward to digging into is John Green’s book, The Anthropocene Reviewed. And it’s a it’s a collection of radio essays that he did, or podcast essays that he did, where the conceit was, that he would give two things a rating out of five stars, and one might be vaccines, and the other one might be watching penguins at the zoo. And he would just, he would use these as a kind of prompt to create a study in contrasts. They’re always very witty and very sweet, very, very heartfelt, as is the mode of John Green, and clever as as the mode both of the Green brothers. And and all I know about this is that it collects the whole series, which I quite enjoyed, and that there are some more, you know, and so I’m looking at the table of contents now, the Lescaux cave paintings, scratch and sniff stickers, Diet Dr. Pepper, velociraptors, Canada geese, the Hall of Presidents at Walt Disney World, Staphylococcus, the Internet, and so on. And he’s given them all ratings at a five and explain them. So I’m looking forward to digging into that.

Ray Briggs
Well, alright, I better go order that book. But thank you so much for joining us Cory. It’s been a pleasure.

Cory Doctorow
The pleasure was all mine. Thank you very much.

Josh Landy
Science fiction writer Cory Doctorow, author of “Making Hay,” you’re listening to Philosophy Talk, and today we’re compiling our annual summer reading list.

Ray Briggs
Coming up, Josh and I are clearly fans of science fiction. But is there more to sci-fi than interstellar space travel and little green men from Mars? Could science fiction be a way to do philosophy?

Josh Landy
Exploring the boundaries of the possible, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Welcome back. I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything

Ray Briggs
except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Today it’s our annual summer reading episode. Thought provoking books for thoughtful summer reading.

Josh Landy
Helen De Cruz, a Professor of Philosophy at St. Louis University. She’s also co-editor along with Johan De Smedt and Eric Schwitzgebel of “Philosophy Through Science Fiction Stories: Exploring the Boundaries of the Possible.” Helen, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Helen De Cruz
Hello. Glad to be here.

Ray Briggs
So Helen, this book you co-edited earlier this year was a shoo-in for our summer reading list. How did that all come about?

Helen De Cruz
Science fiction is inherently philosophical. And so a few years ago, I think it was in 2017, I organized a workshop on science fiction and philosophy. And basically it was a workshop, it was very hands on. And it was to help philosophers to write science fiction stories with the idea that, you know, you could express yourself philosophically, in a science fiction format, in a story format, which I thought was an interesting idea. Because if you look, historically, philosophers have always done this. Lots of philosophy is in the form of stories. Like more recently, you have people like Jean Paul Sartre, wrote, you know, plays and short stories and Simone de Beauvoir, similarly, but if you go further back in time, then you see that lots of philosophy is in the form of stories like the dialogues with Socrates, written by Plato, are all stories. So I got Johan and Eric on board, who both also interested in philosophy and science fiction, to then co-edit a book with philosophy through science fiction stories. And these stories were all new except two reprints. And we specifically commissioned them by philosophers, and by professional science fiction authors on the topic of philosophical science fiction.

Ray Briggs
So Helen, you said that science fiction is inherently philosophical, what about it do you think makes it inherently philosophical?

Helen De Cruz
So I think that a lot of philosophy is that we wonder not just what is, you know, what is happening and what is the case but also what is possible. Like why did we end up the way we did? So we’re exploring, and that’s the subtitle of the book is exploring the boundaries of the possible and so the science fiction does an excellent job in in doing that by looking at, what if the science would allow us to, you know, have interstellar travel, for example? Or what if the science was able to upgrade our bodies to all sorts of ways to all sorts of things that bodies could do that they can’t now do? And what are the ethical implications of that? And in order to really get to grips with that, one of the ways you can do that is to just think about it and mix thought experiments. So in a sense, I think that science fiction stories are like long thought experiments, like long thought through thought experiments that look as what’s possible, and not just what is actual.

Josh Landy
Yeah, it reminds me of something that Johan says in your wonderful book, where he’s talking about in particular about utopias and saying, we really need utopias because, you know, when we think about the future, our imagination is limited. It’s almost like the anchoring effect of our imagination is limited by, by what we see around us. And so we need these imaginative writers to kind of throw us far afield, so that we, you know, we don’t just sort of limit ourselves to what we see now with a couple of tweaks. One of my favorites, is The Intended which is by David John Baker, it’s a, it’s another vision of what seems like a utopia, but turns out not to be entirely without its issues. And, and one of the things I love about this is, you know, you have in this book, people write reflections of their own stories, and, and Baker says, I write a story when I feel like all I have is a question. When I have an answer to a question, I write a philosophy essay. And that’s one of the things I really love about this moment. You say in your introduction, that, you know, in a story, you can leave things unsettled, or you can present the complexity of things. And so is that, you know, when you look at this volume as a whole and all the stories in it, does it feel like you’re successful in that, in presenting stories that do philosophical work, not necessarily by teaching lessons, but by you know, expanding imagination, asking difficult questions. I mean, Johan, at one point talks about inducing doubt and wonder, is that how you see these stories as a set?

Helen De Cruz
Yes, yes. So one of the things that we think that science fiction can do, well, that stories in general can do, and that, unfortunately, philosophy at particularly as a practice now, so philosophy these days is writing papers of about eight to 10,000 words, where you defend a specific point, like in this paper, I’m going to argue that fake news can be analyzed like this, this is the definition of fake news. And I’m going to talk about that it’s not like other people have proposed, this is my definition that works because of these reasons. So that’s a typical philosophy paper. But the problem is, the philosophy paper these days, doesn’t really give us a sense of wonder, because you know, as as the author, you have to sort of give a bite sized unit, you have to give like, this is what I’m saying, here is my brilliant argument that nobody thought before is my contribution to the literature. Whereas I think with stories, you can just leave it. You don’t have to adjudicate and sometimes not adjudicating is better. I mean, if you think about for example, so you have The Brothers Karamazov, you know, often used in philosophy of religion classes. So in Brothers Karamazov, there is this whole discussion where you have two people in the talking and one of them says, you know, evil is so horrific, I want to give back my tickets. I just don’t think you know that a world like that. It’s not that I don’t believe in God, but it’s just horrific. And I just don’t want to be part of it. And that’s beautiful innocence, like, you know, if you could write this as a sort of argument about here’s why I think that the problem of evil is unsurmountable evidence against theism. And there have been papers like that, but there’s still something poetic about just having a character present that or having it happen in the story in such a way that you can draw your own conclusions.

Josh Landy
That’s beautifully put, and that’s that’s the way I felt reading Adjoiners. This gorgeous story by Lisa Schoenberg about a woman with a kind of mind implant allows her to be inside an eagle’s mind, so fantastic. And, you know, she ends with her reflection with all of these unanswered and very difficult questions like, can you commit a crime against yourself? Can you commit a crime against your future self? If a victim is willing, is it still possible for it to be a crime committed against them? What do you think about that story? You know, I found it just, I mean, moving. It’s disturbing. It’s confusing. Where do you land on all of the questions that it raises.

Helen De Cruz
So that story is really fantastic. I agree with you like, overall, I think the collection is really great, really strong. This story in particular, the way it came about was, well, obviously the [unintelligible]. But where it ended up in our collection was that I organized with money from the American Philosophical Association, I got a small grant to organize a short story competition. And so we thought, philosophical short fiction, we won’t be getting many entries. And then we got 700 entries, seven hundred, it was horrendous, like the committee that was going like this, it we didn’t sign up for 700 entries. And so that was like, that was terrible. But the reason is just that the fiction writing market is a really cutthroat market. And people are always looking, you know, to distinguish themselves with prizes. And you know, the show is good for agents, like if you want to put your book out for an agent, you said, look, I won this prize. So we got, we got inundated. But the person who won is philosopher Lisa Schoenberg, philosopher, professional philosopher, who writes fiction, and she wrote this wonderful story about the question of whether you can commit a crime against yourself. And I think that here, the story format is really the best way to explore that question. Like you could do, if you wrote it in just like regular philosophy, then you’d still have to do something like a thought experiment, which is just like a really short story anyway. Right. So I think it’s really great. It exemplifies what we wanted to do with this collection.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk’s annual summer reading special. And we’re talking with Helen De Cruz from St. Louis University, co-editor of “Philosophy and Science Fiction Stories: Exploring the Boundaries of What’s Possible.”

Ray Briggs
So Helen, did you find that there was a difference between how philosophers or people who think of themselves as mostly philosophers approach writing a short story and people who think of themselves as mostly science fiction authors?

Helen De Cruz
I’m not sure. Like you would think yes, that there would be a huge difference. But actually, if you look at the, so each of the authors, both the science fiction authors, and the philosophers wrote story notes to basically explain what’s happening in their story. And it’s interesting to see that also the professional authors, so like [unintelligible] for example, and the other ones as well, those are full time science fiction writers. But nevertheless, if you look at that, that’s very philosophical, the stuff that they discussed. So can you, for example, talks about this, you know, this sort of worry about, if you start using machines then, you know, before you know it, they take over our humanity. And that’s a deeply philosophical question. So, actually, I thought the gap was not as big as I thought it would be, both in the writing and in the writing of the story notes.

Ray Briggs
I’m actually surprised by by that point about Ken Liu’s story notes, because I didn’t think that his story had to do with machines taking over humanity, I thought it had to do with taking something that was individually advantageous, and everybody having a reason to do it, and then that harming sort of everybody overall. So I think it’s really interesting that I thought the moral of the story was something different than he thought the moral of the story was.

Helen De Cruz
Oh, yes, definitely. So I think that you could just as well say that the story by Ken Liu, which is basically about implants used by lawyers and uh, you know, in the end, you have passive billable hours, you’re like, asleep, but you know, the implant is still working. But then if you leave the firm, what’s happening to the implants? So that’s like the worry to me when I was reading it, this was all about corporations taking us over and having too much power of like that was was I thought, what was the the moral of the story. So you can see these stories are so rich, and I thought this was interesting. But earlier, [unintelligible] was at a book launch. And she said, so people ask, do you start out with a philosophical point, and you write a story like that? And she said, no, I just tried to think of, oh, this is a nice idea. Let’s think about what would happen if you know, and then at the end, when she’s written a story, and she says, oh, this is what the story was really about. I didn’t know it would be about the importance of, you know, domesticity and having a home life rather than a life of glory. I didn’t know it would be about that. But it turned out that that’s what it was about. So very often, there’s so much rich material packed into a story that even the author themselves can’t really know what it’s all about.

Ray Briggs
And Helen, what are you looking forward to reading this summer?

Helen De Cruz
So this summer, I will be reading a lot of shorter fiction, because I’m co-editing this book with Eric Schwitzgebel and [unintellgible], which is classic philosophical fiction. So we’ll look at like really old stuff like Thomas Moore and see if we can sort of excerpt things from that. And so philosophical science fiction, so we’ll we’ll look at Kepler’s Somnium, which is like this really bizarre science fiction story written by Johannes Kepler, about a witch and her son, you know, and traveling to space.

Josh Landy
And Cyrano de Bergerac?

Helen De Cruz
Yes, we might. So the problem is, it’s a novel, it’s not really short story. But we consider excerpting Cyrano de Bergerac and potentially few others of these 18th century. So the 18th century science fiction is so interesting. Like there is-

Josh Landy
Voltaire has that lovely story, Micromegas, right?

Helen De Cruz
Yes, yes, he does. That’s also quite long, but maybe incorporable. And then there is he also wrote a really short story that’s sort of funny about religion. Anyway, so I’ll be basically busy looking into all of these and trying to see and we will all three co-editors will do this, and we’ll see what we what we can get out of there.

Josh Landy
Well, Helen, thank you so much for joining us today.

Helen De Cruz
Thank you for talking to me about the book.

Ray Briggs
Helen De Cruz from St. Louis University, co-editor of “Philosophy Through Science Fiction Stories: Exploring the Boundaries of the Possible.”

Josh Landy
You can find all the books we’ve talked about on today’s show, along with other recommendations from our listeners over at our website’s philosophytalk.org.

Ray Briggs
Now, in case you’re in the mood for some speed reading, it’s Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales. Summer reading does seem to be among those things along with I don’t know AOL, Nash Ramblers yellow cabs and civility in politics that will soon only be seen from rearview mirror unless we have one of those cars that drive themselves in which case we’ll be sleeping in the backseat. And only the robots steering the car will be paying attention. Such lists usually emanate from book review sections of your newspaper if you still have either of those. Scholastic the publisher of kids book still has one, along with the reading fair, reading clubs and summer reading certificates of achievement which all make sense when you’re trying to plug the sale of your own books. I don’t know if they still do this but the release of the little Scholastic Book catalog was a huge event in my grade school with a deadline for ordering. My mom let me know I could order three books, and I would pore over the selections with care when the time came, my mother would safety pin dollar bills to my shirt which had my name embroidered on it by the way, and six weeks later, I’ll be the proud owner of more books about dogs which are mutts, horses which are amazing, and paper boys who solve a mystery. Nowadays thanks to Harry Potter, Scholastic no longer has to drag entire classrooms into their book racket. They got it made. Scholastic titles seem to dwell on that sweet spot of books you like, they’re also good for you, that is they had some highly specific social relevance: bicycle safety or playing with firecrackers or the importance of family, often set in a familiar social milieu, yet they didn’t have that glaring self consciousness which plagues young adult fiction these days and which you must have a child of mixed race leading the ragtag racially mixed gender fluid gang of pals and their mission to defeat the wizard that just moved into the ranch style home at the end of the cul de sac. Meanwhile, in the real world, there’s an army of trolls paid by the cancel culture to make sure that you don’t use outdated idioms racistly, use the proper cliches or get out. All of which makes you want to just throw books across the room and turn to Twitter for relaxation, because that’s the curse of summer reading, it’s supposed to be relaxing. And during our forced year off, thanks to COVID has proved that we are incapable of relaxing. Kvetching, whining, demanding recounts, learning with derision, we’re good at that. Plus most books on offer these days are books I don’t want to read: self help books, memoirs about personal journeys, single parents how to, female friendships, problematic, recovery, novels about hidden family secrets, hidden childhood secrets and novels about placid communities are actually claustrophobic hotbeds of hidden crimes, oh and of course, excellent ongoing infinite series of tell all books about Donald Trump. Of course I’ve been reading up a storm since last summer’s reading list. And the ongoing lockdown sent me through all genres: ghost stories, horror stories, mystery, science fiction and on to histories of ghost stories, horror stories, mystery and histories of men magazines, cartoons, pulp fiction, and finally, back to the essence of what some are reading ought to be something you can bring to the beach or in my case under a tree. Comic books are what you need. Stick one on your back pocket and go. Maybe grab a lemonade, sit down down the shade, turn to the ongoing adventures of the spirit or Batman or Blackhawks gang of ace pilots fighting Nazis in the sky and on the ground and if you finish the comic before your lemonade, go back look at the ads. They’re very restful. Chihuahua in a coffee cup, 100 soldiers in a trunk, make your own go kart, crazy labels, hypnocoin, skull ring, monster masks, then take a nap under the tree and may your dreams be untroubled by vote counts or even by the guilt you are going to be feeling for spending 20 bucks on a vintage comic book just to take it out of the bag and cram it in your back pocket. What are you, 12? This is why we can’t have nice things. I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2021.

Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
Thanks also to Merle Kessler and Angela Johnston.

Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
The views expressed or misexpressed on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders,

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website philosophytalk.org, where you can subscribe to our library of more than 500 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

Denzel Washington
You have to set an example even in the face of stupidity. Now everybody that reads comic books knows that Kirby Silver Surfer is the only true Silver Surfer. Now am I right or wrong?