Linked Stories by Gina Isabel R.

Harman sees Lovecraft’s “failures” precisely as “virtues.” Where 20th century philosophy was marked by the “linguistic turn” and various attempts at reductionism, and accordingly mixed results, Lovecraft insisted on and reveled in identifying both the limits of language and the unexplainable gaps in reality. Harman, according to Stefans, hopes to make Lovecraft “a foot soldier” in a war “against bland, realist empiricism” in the vein of Hume and Kant.

Even at a place like MIT, there has been so much of a transformation of MIT from a boutique nerd school to a more mainstream select college, but on average are there more sci-fi nerds than there were when I was teaching at NYU a year ago? Hell yes. Are there as many as I wanted? No. I really did think I would be able to literally form a sub-club for “Fans of Dune,” and we would have like 500 members, but that wasn’t to be. Or the “Samuel R. Delany-ists,” but that didn’t happen.

Well, when you look at a lot of science fiction novels they’re asking questions about power. There are questions about what it means to have power and what are the long-term consequences of power. When you think about the Dune novels — the original Dune novels start out as this Machiavellian fix-up — the battle between these houses — but they turn out to be a very troubling meditation on what it means to take over an entire civilization and set it on a certain path.

But there were other books that just were supremely important to me, where I was like, damn. Stuff was happening in these science fiction books that I wasn’t seeing anywhere. Whether it was the Dorsai series or Harry Harrison or the Death World novels, where they’re imprisoned in this nightmare world where it’s sort of like a Doom videogame on crack. There was all of this extreme stuff happening that resonated with a lot of the ideas and experiences and the historical shadows that have been cast from the Dominican Republic. I didn’t see mainstream, literary, realistic fiction talking about power, talking about dictatorship, talking about the consequences of breeding people, which of course is something that in the Caribbean is never far away.

As a child, I liked to watch people write. I would copy how they held their pens. I would scribble a string of loops. But I was mostly intrigued by that mark they all did at the end of a line. That emphatic jab at the page. That exquisite control I didn’t understand. And I didn’t yet need. But I secretly already wanted.