Name<\/strong>: Tyler Harper<\/p>\n\n\n\n Position<\/strong>: Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies<\/p>\n\n\n\n Degrees from<\/strong>: <\/strong>New York University, Ph.D. in comparative literature and M.A. in comparative literature; Haverford College, B.A. in English<\/p>\n\n\n\n His work<\/strong>: <\/strong>Harper researches the evolving ways in which science fiction writers have depicted human extinction, and how the concept of extinction has changed since 1796, when scientist Georges Cuvier proved that species extinction was in fact possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Completed in May, Harper\u2019s dissertation was on \u201cThe Specter of Extinction: Environmental Nihilism in British Science Fiction (1800\u20131945).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why sci-fi? <\/strong>With a literary canon that includes books from L. Ron Hubbard, and with movie titles like Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man<\/em>, science fiction in America is a \u201cheavily stereotyped genre,\u201d Harper says. \u201cWe’re often used to thinking of sci-fi as entertainment or as beach reading.\u201d Plus, it\u2019s a genre that’s frequently \u201ccoded as both white and male,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n For a liberal arts professor, stereotype is a door waiting to be kicked open. \u201cOne of the joys of teaching science fiction is getting students to see sci-fi differently \u2014 as a genre that not only engages with big ideas but also that includes some great works written by marginalized voices.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n A sample lesson<\/strong>: Harper says that he\u2019s always loved introducing students to the novel Dawn<\/em>, by Octavia Butler, the first Black female science fiction writer to reach national prominence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n One of her earlier works, Dawn<\/em> poses the \u201cbig questions that I find tend to excite students. Questions like, is the fear of otherness innate? Or is it learned? Can it be unlearned? And, is the exploitation of nature or other species ever justifiable?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In class, he\u2019ll lead an exercise in argument mapping to \u201cbreak down the various worldviews presented by a novel or film and look who is presenting those views, how they clash, and how they’re reconciled.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The exercise \u201cgets students to slow down, look past the aliens and the spaceships, and really confront the profound and topical questions about the environment and our place in it that a novel like Dawn<\/em> conveys.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why Bates? <\/strong>\u201cBates struck me as an institution that really strives to navigate a balance,\u201d Harper says. While \u201cupholding the traditional concept of a liberal arts college as a space in which students are able to think on a campus \u2014 free from the distractions of the world around them,\u201d the college also works to bring \u201cthe liberal arts model into the 21st century.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Imagining Extinction<\/strong>: <\/strong>British science fiction writers of the 1800s and early 1900s, like Mary Shelley, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and H.G. Wells, imagined that the natural world was the prime threat to human life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In their works, \u201cnature was re-imagined as not only a threat to the species, but a threat to the very moral vision that informed Western thinking about humanity in general,” Harper says. He calls this \u2018environmental nihilism’: the threat of meaninglessness posed by the recognition that nature is completely indifferent to human existence.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Britain during the early Romantic era \u2014 the late 1700s into the early 1800s \u2014 these initial extinction narratives also tended to “imagine threats to the species as arising from absolute catastrophes that could not be avoided or prevented,\u201d he explains. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Later, particularly in the wake of Darwin’s discoveries in the mid-1800s, the threat of extinction was re-imagined as \u201csomething that could be mitigated by human ingenuity and power, something we might be able to prepare for politically, technologically, scientifically and so on. This view still informs contemporary reflection on human extinction.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The idea that nature was the major threat to humankind changed after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan: \u201cHuman extinction was now recognized as something that humans might bring about,\u201d says Harper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, climate change<\/strong>: A legacy of 19th- and early 20th-century science fiction is today\u2019s belief that \u201cwe can confront the threat of climate change with large-scale technological solutions, like geo-engineering,\u201d Harper says. <\/p>\n\n\n\n However, clinging to a magic-bullet solution, he says, merely \u201cbecomes a way to avoid thinking about climate change as a political crisis.\u201d Today\u2019s science fiction can address this avoidance and reinforce the politics of the climate crisis by imagining the \u201cways different groups of people are more or less implicated by environmental violence.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n In other words, writers of climate fiction can show us new worlds after climate change and raise the question: Who gets to live in these new worlds? <\/p>\n\n\n\n Any catastrophe, whether it threatens extinction or not, \u201cimpacts different racial groups unequally and acts on different communities in different nations unequally. It’s imperative that we think about a problem that seems fantastical but is in fact quite pressing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Do we survive?<\/strong> \u201cI remain an optimist,\u201d Harper says. \u201cBut I think one of the reasons I’m drawn to thinking about human extinction is that there are people with tremendous power and wealth who take the question of human extinction very seriously. You have people in Silicon Valley building compounds in New Zealand in preparation for a coming climate catastrophe.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Harper adds, \u201cWe have, especially in academia, a duty to think seriously about this as well and to draw attention to the oversimplifications that we see in a news item, for example, about Elon Musk wanting to establish a human colony on Mars as a backup if Earth were to become uninhabitable.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Harper researches how science fiction depicts human extinction while asking, “Who gets to live in new worlds?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1005,"featured_media":135905,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[4,166,217],"tags":[12201,10760,12208],"class_list":["post-135895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-life","category-humanities-history","category-science-technology","tag-2020-tenure-track-2","tag-environmental-studies","tag-tyler-harper"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1005"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135895"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135895\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":135963,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135895\/revisions\/135963"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/135905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Assistant](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2020\/09\/200814_Tyler_Harper_0044-900x600.jpg\")
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