Illustrations by Angelica Navarro ’21 OVER THE PAST FEW DECADES, popular culture has embraced science fiction and fantasy in ways it never has before. What was once considered niche—after all, the first Star Trek television series was cancelled after three seasons—now leads the zeitgeist; every year, a different movie based on a comic book seems to take the top spot at the box office. (Last year’s record holder was Avengers: Endgame.) With such explosive growth in the genre, it would seem to follow that more opportunities would be available for all kinds of content creators—though results have been mixed. Three alumnae who work in the space—Alex Brown ’05, Stephanie Der ’13, and Sarah Kuhn ’99— recently chatted with Mills Quarterly about their experiences navigating what can be a tricky landscape. Read the full conversation at quarterly.mills.edu.
Quarterly: What piece of media did you see or read in your childhood that inspired you to pursue your interest in genre fiction? SARAH KUHN: I grew up in a really small, really white town, and sci-fi and fantasy showed me the potential for a bigger world out there. I grew up obsessed with all the big tentpoles—I loved Star Wars, I loved Star Trek; Deep Space Nine is my jam. I loved the X-Men in part because they were the superheroes that spend as much time arguing about their feelings and interpersonal dramas as they do fighting evil. When I was younger, being into those things was not cool. Our library had one wall with all the sci-fi and fantasy books, so I would find a series and read everything obsessively, and I would try to find ways to sneak it into conversation even though no one knew what I was talking about. Some of the series I loved when I was younger were Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern and everything Ursula K. Le Guin. Of course, a lot of those things were still pretty white, not super diverse. I remember it was a huge deal when Deep Space Nine came out because a black man was in charge of the space station, and that was definitely a meaningful moment. But it has taken these franchises a long time to progress toward the kind of diversity that we think of as the future. ALEX BROWN: As a kid, I really loved Batman: The Animated Series and X-Men, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel were basically my entire life as a teenager. This was back in the days of landlines, so my friends and I would run to the phone and call each other during the commercials. Then, in 2008, a friend of mine sent me a clip of Spike (James Marsters from Buffy) making out with another man in a scene from Torchwood! I found out Torchwood was a spinoff of Doctor Who, so of course I had to watch that too. I became madly obsessed, and it reignited the love of science fiction and fantasy that I had as a kid. And my obsession with Doctor Who led to my job on Tor.com because I was writing massive essaylong comments about episodes of the show, and they were like, “Do you want to just get paid to write?” I’m not a huge science fiction person—once characters start talking about hyperdrives and how a spaceship 14
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