Science Fiction & Public Health Podcast
A podcast about fertilizing creativity, hope, and vision by bringing different categories of sci-fi into the public health classroom.
This is a companion audio series to the course Science Fiction & Public Health taught at the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health by Nell Carpenter and Alexis Dinno during the Winter 2024 term
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Episode 10: Student Workshops and Where Our Journey Took Us
We share the two phenomenal workshops integrating science fiction with public health which our students produced. Nell and Alexis also interview one another about what they have learned of science fiction & public health along this journey, particularly with respect to education, and, of course, they share their current science fiction consumption. Duration: 48:55
Podcast Wednesday, April 10, 2024: SFAPH Podcast Episode 10.mp3
Episode 9: Culminating Discussion of N. K. Jemisin’s
The Fifth Season
Our show and tell segment was a piece of flash science fiction by Alexis titled “Revelation” (copyright Alexis Dinno, 2023). Today we cover our class’ final discussion of N. K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season. Today’s episode image is fan art of The Fifth Season, including “Alabaster Madonna” (2018) by @Jemppu on DeviantArt (left), and “Obelisk” (2018) by @deathogs on tumblr. Duration: 43:57
Podcast Thursday, April 4, 2024: SFAPH Podcast Episode 9.mp3
Episode 8: Multimedia Sci-Fi: Film, TV, Gaming, Art, Music, Etc.
In our show and tell segment, Alexis read China Miéville’s short story “Buscard’s Murrain” as it appears in The Thackery T. Lambshead’s Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases edited by Jeff Vandermeer—a story of particular creepiness to public health professionals. However, this class was entirely show and tell, as we assigned students to share forms of science fiction not centering text which speak in some way to their interests in public health and its determinants. Our students present on (in no particular order):
- Ashley Gripper’s Land-Based Jawns and Earthseed Skill-Share
- “Chant”, a recording from the musical Hadestown by Anaïs Mitchell
- A life-size sculpture of the RX-0 “Unicorn” Gundam mecha
- A replica of a Bajoran earring inspired by Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- A solarpunk animation titled Dear Alice: Decommodified Edition and the commercial it was highjacked from
- An excerpt from the anime series Keep Your Hands Off Eizuken!
- The web-based video game Half Earth Socialism
We spent about half the class playing Ben Robbins’ new story game titled In This World (here’s Ben’s ars ludi game design blog). Today’s episode image is an hallucination generated from the combined output of a large language model and a text-to-image model from a world where libraries serve very different functions than in our world. Duration: 1:01:58
Podcast Sunday, March 24, 2024: SFAPH Podcast Episode 8.mp3
Episode 6–7 Extras
During each class participants bring up works and resources of science fiction and speculative fiction—impromptu show & tell if you will. Episode Extras are a place we share these out. In no particular order from class 6 and class 7:
- On the topic of ‘literature people were exposed to while too young’ Alexis brought up Dorothy Bryant’s 1971 novel The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You, a class member mentioned Steven Gould’s 1992 novel Jumper (on which the film was based), and Nell mentioned Virginial Woolf’s 1927 novel To The Lighthouse.
- Ted Chiang’s masterful “Story of Your Life” upon which the film Arrival was based came up… possibly in the context of science fiction about language and translation.
- Discussion of the concept of terraforming necessitated mentioning Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy which covers a few centuries of human settlement and terraforming of the eponymous planet. Another of his works, the 2002 novel The Years of Rice and Salt was mentioned as an example of the alternate history genre of science fiction.
- Isaac Marion’s 2010 novel Warm Bodies was discussed as an enrichment of, and reinterpretation of the zombie as metaphor for the consequences of ostracism and demonization.
- Embassytown (2011) by China Miéville describes a multi-species encounter investigating translation and the sharing of new language (leaving aside the content of what is communicated with it) as a potent force for revolutionary societal transformation. A similar theme was discussed with respect to Communion (1987) by Whitley Strieber.
- Director Gregg Araki’s 2004 film Mysterious Skin was brought up in the context of alien abduction as a kind of white metaphor for experiencing the kinds of violence perpetrated upon colonized and enslaved people. The film also explores alien abduction as self-protective metaphor for violence perpetrated on children by adults.
- Finally, Nina Paley’s “This Land Is Mine” scene from her animated feature film Seder-Masochism based on Pat Boone’s song “The Exodus Theme (This Land Is Mine)” was mentioned in the context of settler colonialism and hard feelings in the context of Israel’s current invasion of Gaza.
Saturday, March 16, 2024
Episode 6–7: Public Health Topics in Science Fiction, part 2:
Policy, Social Determinants of Health, Societal Change,
Afrofuturism, and Indigenous Futurisms
We share two show & tell segments: one about The Encyclopedia of Things That Never Were by Robert Ingpen and Michael Page, and another about knitting as science ficition. In this episode we range across works including Mark Dery’s interview with trailblazing Black gay science fiction author Samuel Delaney appearing in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture under the title “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel Delaney, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose”, a remarkable work of legal scholarship & science fiction from 2019 titled “Afrofuturism, Critical Race Theory, and Policing in the Year 2044” by I. Bennett Capers in the NYU Law Review, a 2018 essay appearing in Uncanny Magazine titled “The Future is not Disabled” by Marieke Nijkamp, and the introduction to Grace L. Dillon’s amazing Indigenous futurism anthology Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction. We also discuss excerpts and short works of science fiction by Sherman Alexie, Ada Palmer, Neil Gaiman, Hassan Blasim, Octavia Butler, and Nalo Hopkinson. Today’s episode image is an excerpt of an alamy stock promotional image of actor Levar Burton as the congenitally blind Star Trek: The Next Generation character Geordi La Forge wearing his VISOR: a technology which serves Mr. La Forge in place of typical human vision. Duration: 49:29
Podcast Wednesday, March 13, 2024: SFAPH Podcast Episode 6–7.mp3
Episode 5: Public Health Topics in Science Fiction, part 1:
Contagion, Disease, Climate
For our show & tell segment, Alexis elevates Internet literacy, by describing stackexchange-type resources which are topically-focused and community-curated question & answer sites, describing the StackExchange network, and finally lands on the Science Fiction & Fantasy StackExchange. Throughout the episode we discuss different public health themes which arise in science fiction, including novel plagues and outbreaks, climate disasters, as well as collective responses to the same, and personal responses to the same, particularly around experiences of grief. We contrast the way grief shows up in academic writing on population experiencs of death and disease, and the way grief shows up in science fiction. Today’s episode image is an excerpt of the paperback cover art to the 2013 Hachette edition of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx & Crake, which is the first in a trilogy of feminist post-apocalyptic dystopian weird eco-fiction. Duration: 46:08
Podcast Monday, February 19, 2024: SFAPH Podcast Episode 5.mp3
Episode 4: “Doing” Science Fiction & Public Health
We dive into how a class role playing game inspired by Octavia Butler’s short story “Speech Sounds” went. The game divided the class into two groups, plus Nell and Alexis, and imagined a world where about half the human species lost the power of speech and listening comprehension, half lost the power of reading, writing, and comprehending non-spoken symbols, and a tiny minority retained full language capacity. A student shared the visioning, planning, and production of Japanese “smart city” Kashiwa-no-ha. We also share our enjoyment of the animated science fiction series Scavengers Reign. Today’s episode image, a work titled New Crobuzon by Deviant Art artist HaHiFiZi depicts the eponymous fictional cityscape under the threat of some extremely disturbing giant moths as written in Perdido Street Station, and other works set in the world of Bas-Lag by China Miéville. Duration: 45:16
Podcast Saturday, February 17, 2024: SFAPH Podcast Episode 4.mp3
SF&PH Episode 3 Extras
During each class participants bring up works and resources of science fiction and speculative fiction—impromptu show & tell if you will. Episode Extras are a place we share these out. In no particular order from class 3:
- The Three Body Problem by Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin (the first novel of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy) addresses a ‘slow’ first contact spanning generations, and raises questions about humanity’s ability to enter an interstellar social ecology.
- Andrew “Andy” Taylor Weir’s The Martian and Project Hail Mary came up in the context of a current author operating within the genre of hard science fiction.
- Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli wrote a non-fiction explainer of the history of the ideas in quantum mechanics titled Helgoland, which is intentionally inflected by Rovelli’s relational interpretation of quantum mechanics. Rovelli’s philosophical orientation provides an example of how “using” science fiction jibes with “doing” science fiction in the example of the (in)famous Schröedinger’s Cat thought experiment.
- We also, inevitably, got around to mentioning Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”.
Monday, February 12, 2024
Episode 3: “Using” Science Ficition for Public Health
We briefly describe a student’s show and tell of two books—Elizabeth J. Tasker’s The Planet Factory and Andrew H. Knoll’s Life on a Young Planet—which, although both are works of non-fiction, nonetheless fertilize the imagination. Today we dove into and refined Nell’s concept of “using” science fiction in public health, drawing on an essay titled “Climate Fiction: A Promising Way of Communicating Climate Change with the General Public” by Mingcan Rong about the usefulness of climate fiction to bridge the psychological distance between global climate change, and the individual’s experiences in it, as well as a master’s thesis & capstone by Syd Thorne titled “Through Critique and Beyond: Speculative Fiction as a Tool of Critical Pedagogy” that extols speculative fiction as a source of hope for both teachers and students. We also continue to foray further into N. K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season. Today’s episode image excerpts from Vincent Di Fate’s 1970s paperback cover art for Frank Herbert’s novel Dune. Duration: 46:52
Podcast Monday, February 5, 2024: SFAPH Podcast Episode 3.mp3
SF&PH Episode 2 Extras
During each class participants bring up works and resources of science fiction and speculative fiction—impromptu show & tell if you will. Episode Extras are a place we share these out. In no particular order from class 2:
- Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber has a chapter about the (utterly fictitious) mythologizing of a bygone era of barter, which is a kind of alternative history sci-fi which serves as a foundational mythology requisite to orthodox economic theory.
- Robert Ingpen & Michael Page’s Encyclopedia of Things That Never Were was suggested as a good accompanyment to The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, to which Alexis also suggests the 15th century Voynich Manuscript, and the (1981) Codex Seraphinianus to really encourage your mind to wander.
- Kiril Eskov’s fan-fic The Last Ringbearer contends with and reinterprets Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings as a work of state propaganda written by the victors of a genocidal war, and picks up where the so-called War of the Ring ended, and is told from the perspective of characters on the losing side of that conflict. (English translation by Yisroel Markov).
- The Insane Liberation Front and Madness Network News were early projects of mad-pride and destigmatization which originally emerged in Portland, Oregon.
Tuesday, January 30, 2024
Episode 2: Imagination & Envisioning for Public Health
Today we open with a short segment drawing explicit links between sci-fi and public health. Alexis briefly shared the 1980 edition of The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, an enclopedic reference to fictional geographies from stories written across the ages written as a travelers guide by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi. We spend the majority of our time discussing the social imagination, the importance of conceiving and practicing memory and historiography as a kind of commons, give consideration to the “functions” of science fiction in public health, and discuss what, if anything, the “public health imagination” might be. We are supported in this process by authors drawing heavily on the work by C. Wright Mills articulation of the “social imagination”, including Max Haiven who writes about commoning memory, and Sean Seeger & Daniel Davison-Vecchione who write about the role of dystopian literature in feeding a sociological imagination, Amazon employees imagining the future conditions of their own labor in the Amazon Worker as Futurist project, Alex Khasnabish & Max Haiven’s The Radical Imagination Project, and Manjana Milkoreit’s writing about the social imagination necessary to both understand and to confront the unfolding of anthropogenic climate change. Our episode image today is an excerpt from Fritz Lang’s 1927 science fiction film Metropolis. Duration: 52:20
Podcast Saturday, January 27, 2024: SFAPH Podcast Episode 2.mp3
SF&PH Episode 1 Extras, Extended
A few more works from or salient to class 1:
- Ex Machina is a 2014 film directed by Alex Garland which is built around the Turing test in a near-future world where androids with generalized sentience are emerging. This work came up in the context of science ficiton as concerned with ethics and social mores. Alexis felt the film landed on the wrong question (Can AI androids be mistaken for human?), and wishes Garland had spent more time with the question How can different intelligences treat one another with compassion?
In l’esprit de l’escalier regarding explorations of gender in science ficiton:
- Ann Leckie’s space opera Imperial Radch trilogy beginning with Ancillary Justice (Leckie devotes much of her work to questions about how non-human and transhuman intelligences grapple with anthropocentric norms around things like embodiment and gender systems)
- Neil Gaiman’s “Changes” is a short story appearing in his anthology Smoke and Mirrors
Tuesday, January 16, 2024
SF&PH Episode 1 Extras
During each class participants bring up works and resources of science fiction and speculative fiction—impromptu show & tell if you will. Episode Extras are a place we share these out. In no particular order from class 1:
- Stina Leicht’s novels Persephone Station and Loki’s Ring
- Italo Calvino’s anthology Invisible Cities was suggested as fantastic fiction and science fiction from a 20th century urbanism frame.
- The architecture and ideas of Le Corbusier manifested science fiction in architecture
- Any of Nina Paley’s works in underground feminist comics, animation, quilting, or other arts
- China Miéville’s novel The City and The City provides a mind-bending police-procedural-as-parable for the ways our socially-conditioned gazes are reified in urban design.
During class, someone articulated a desire for more exploration of gender within science fiction. Off the top of Alexis’ head, these were places she recognized science fiction as having already obliged:
- Joanna Russ’ novel The Female Man
- Marge Piercy’s novel Woman on the Edge of Time
- Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Left Hand of Darkness
- Anything Yoon Ha Lee has written
- Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf
- An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon
- The Terra Ignota tetrology, starting with Too Like The Lightning by Ada Palmer also bears mention here.
Thursday, January 11, 2024
Episode 1: What Is Science Fiction?
Today we examine different answers to the question “What is science fiction”, and consider how answers to this question matter, with insights from our students, and drawing on the words of Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Isaac Asimov, Cixin Liu, and adrienne maree brown. We share a little about space artist Don Davis’ visionary paintings of the Stanford Torus space habitat. We also discuss aspects of literary “gaze”, particularly the colonial gaze, and relate these to utopian and dystopian urges in fiction. An excerpt from the composition “Also sprach Zarathustra”, Opus 30 by Richard Strauss was provided courtesy of PM Music. Duration: 49:30
Podcast Wednesday, January 10, 2024: SFAPH Podcast Episode 1.mp3
Episode 0: What Are We Doing & How Did We Get Here?
Podcast Monday, January 8, 2024: SFAPH Podcast Episode 0.mp3