BROKEN KNOWLEDGE (2)

By: Mark Kingwell
October 6, 2025

University of Toronto philosopher Mark Kingwell and HILOBROW‘s Josh Glenn are coauthors of The Idler’s Glossary (2008), The Wage Slave’s Glossary (2011), and The Adventurer’s Glossary (2021). In 2022, they engaged in an epistolary exchange about science fiction. Via the series BROKEN KNOWLEDGE, the title of which references Francis Bacon’s philosophy, HILOBROW is pleased to share a lightly edited version of their exchange with our readers. Also see Josh and Mark’s previous exchange 49th PARALLEL.

WHAT IF?

9th September, 2022
TORONTO

Hi Josh.

Thanks for kicking off our discussion with so many memories that resonate with mine. I’m a few years older than you, and grew up in a different country, but our cultural context here is virtually identical. I can’t really remember the first SF story I read, though it might have been something from Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles. I used to poach books from my father’s bookshelves in the living room, which were largely Book of the Month Club and Time-Life selections. Later on I would boost his copies of No Exit and The Screwtape Letters, not to mention The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. But at the time — maybe 1975? — it was outer space that fetched my imagination. I think my toys reflected that too — my earliest favourite was a robot set that allowed players to plug a power source into different vehicles.

Later on my dad and I watched Star Trek re-runs together, and we stayed up all night to watch one of the Apollo moon landings (maybe Apollo 16?) — wasted on me, since I fell asleep. My father was in the air force and he loved everything about aviation, something I have inherited. Science fiction, predicated on space-age travel, was a natural fit for both of us. Like you, by the time of the 1977 Star Wars premiere I was already a confirmed SF fan-boy. I saw the original film ten times in theatres, lying about my age so I could pay the kid’s price rather than the teenage one. I didn’t care for CE3K (as it was always called then) because of a comprehensive aversion to Richard Dreyfus. And I’ve deplored large chunks of what the Star Wars universe has become since then, but what are you going to do? At the time, I had all the Star Wars action figures and bed sheets and posters that I could lay my hands on. I was in love with Leia and wanted to be Han, like every sane pre-adolescent boy.

The action figures related to my other emerging passions circa the mid-Seventies, plastic modelling and early role-playing games. These continued through middle school and high school years. I did a lot of kit-bashing (using two or more standard kits to create one-off goofy spaceships and off-world vehicles) and I was the only dungeon-master in my school. Like you, fantasy came to dominate over hard SF, especially Tolkien and (it pains me a bit to say) Robert E. Howard. But there were lots of hybrids there too — Fritz Leiber, Frank Herbert — and I read everything of that kind. I would take the bus into downtown Winnipeg every Saturday to play RPGs with some other guys in the basement of a local hobby shop. Upstairs I spent my hard-earned allowance on lead figurines, early D&D publications, copies of F&SF magazine and Aeroplane Monthly. A friend of mine worked in a nearby bookstore. The practice in publishing then was to accept torn-off paperback covers as returns to publishers. This meant that the books themselves, not worth shipping back, were supposed to be pulped by retailers. Instead, I got my pick — such that most of my bedroom library of fantasy and science fiction titles from the 1970s were coverless paperbacks from Dell and Tor.

The exceptions were those boxed sets of Lord of the Rings, The Narnia Chronicles, and the green-sleeved Hobbit that I still have today — prized gifts I can see from where I write this. My plastic models and big binder of dungeon levels are long gone, but I can still feel the golden thread that connects my almost 60-year-old self to that young nerd growing up on air force bases across Canada.

Last point (though I could go on like this for far too long!) relates to your suggestion about utopia. I think it’s obvious to me in retrospect that I became a political philosopher, even though I could not have known there was even such a profession when I was a kid, in part because of this early education in possible worlds. In my mind there was always an affinity between speculative fiction’s obsession with the utopian/dystopian dynamic and other things I began to read: Gulliver’s Travels, More’s Utopia, eventually Plato and Fourier. I am not a utopian, but the prospect of an ideal (or, conversely, tyrannical) society is surely the motive for anyone who trades in issues of distributive justice. More deeply, as our mutual friend Jonathan Lethem has said, there is something inherently philosophical about all science fiction: it asks child-like questions in a grown-up way. This philosophical or political interest needn’t be mature and developed — though, like you, I now enjoy Le Guin, Butler, Leckie, Dick, Atwood and other “serious” SF writers more than the space opera of my youth — but it is always present. What if?

So this leads to a hard question. You have a scholarly interest in SF, especially in categorizing its periods. I want to hear more about that. I’m also interested in the ever-debated question of what counts as SF. (Atwood is a great case in point; there are many others.) Is SF “genre fiction” in the pejorative sense? What defines a genre? What are its boundaries and permutations? Does it matter? I guess that makes for a few hard questions, but all related I think. Over to you!

***

ALSO SEE: Josh’s BEST 250 ADVENTURES of the 20th CENTURY list | Mark on BATTLESTAR GALACTICA and THE HONG KONG CAVALIERS | Mark and Josh’s exchange 49th PARALLEL.

BROKEN KNOWLEDGE (2)

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