Teaching Notes: Landscape with Invisible Hand by M. T. Anderson

Landscape with Invisible Hand by M. T. Anderson

For the past couple years, I've based my AWR 101 class here at the University of Tampa around the "theme" of science fiction. That is to say, we practice our skills of analysis on some common science fiction text, and I also provide them with some "lens" essays about science fiction, before then opening it up so that they can select their own science fiction texts. But each semester, I adjust what texts I use in combination with what. I particularly struggled to pick good focal texts for my lens unit; I really wanted something that embodies China Miéville's idea of sf-as-metaphor-and-literal and also complicated Isaac Asimov's categories of science fiction, but over the years I tried various combinations of Cordwainer Smith's "Scanners Live in Vain," Ted Chiang's "The Lifecycle of Software Objects," and Sarah Pinsker's "And Then There Were (N-One)," but for first-year non-majors they were too long or too confusing or too both. (One that did work reliably well was Fonda Lee's "I (28M) created a deepfake girlfriend and now my parents think we're getting married.")

Originally published: 2017
Acquired: September 2022
Reread: October 2022

Eventually, this popped into my head: M. T. Anderson's short YA novel Landscape with Invisible Hand. A few years ago, I presented about it at the Science Fiction Research Association conference, arguing that was like H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds: what if the aliens did to our country what we were doing to the rest of the world? It seemed a particularly apt example of sf-as-metaphor, because it is a very heavy-handed one. The rich live in floating houses, so the rich literally look down on regular people! It's also pretty short, and very accessible, as the world it depicts is just like our contemporary world, but with aliens. And I realized it would pair well with a podcast I was thinking of teaching, "The Science Fiction Origins of the Metaverse" from WNYC's On the Media. So I dropped two short stories from my syllabus and replaced them with Landscape, stretched out across three days of class.

It was a hit. Not in the sense that a parade of students came up to me and told me that they loved it (though a few of them seemed to like it, at least), but in that it did exactly what it needed to. I had many students pair it with Miéville and discuss its metaphorical depiction of things like class issues and social media influencers and healthcare. These are a bit obvious, to be honest, but the kind of obvious that works well for a college freshman. If you want to be able to say, "A key tool of analysis is pairing two texts together, and using one as a lens," obvious connections are often what you need.

But it made some unexpected good connections with my other lenses too. When I was teaching Asimov's introductions to Soviet Science Fiction and More Soviet Science Fiction, it was a good example of his Stage Three-C story, the "if this goes on—" anti-utopia. Last semester I switched to a different Asimov essay, "Social Science Fiction," but it worked well with that too, being a good example of how Asimov argues social sf depicts futures to show the way things should or should not be. Some particularly strong papers argued it wasn't really like Asimov's definition of "social science fiction" but rather his definition of "social fiction" because it wasn't really interested in the future at all, just holding up a mirror to the present. Another student argued that the novel seems like it ought to be an example of Asimov's adventure science fiction, but it's actually social science fiction, which I thought was an insightful point.

It also paired well with the On the Media podcast; in some obvious ways (the podcast discusses how sf isn't really about the future, just commentary about the present) but also in ways where students surprised me. The podcast talks about how it's easy for sf to give us nothing but despair, but at its best, it gives us hope too, and that turned out to be a nice lens for discussing the end of the novel, which (I think) struggles to find grounds for hope in the face of despair at a social catastrophe. The novel spends its whole time demonstrating a widespread social problem, but then I think it wants you to be happy when the protagonist's immediate issues are resolved... even though the social inequalities that caused them remain in place. I think the best lens texts resolve something confusing or difficult about a text but also open up new possibilities, and I find the ending of Landscape particularly frustrating, and I got some good papers looking at that.

In the fall, I think I'll be switching "themes" again, so this will be my last time teaching Landscape with Invisible Hand for the foreseeable, but I think it allowed me to perfect my science fiction theme in its  last year.