J. P. Smythe Author Visit
On Monday 18th June, Year Seven had an afternoon with the
award winning author JP Smythe. The students have been introduced to Smythe’s Australia series in Year 7 Activity
discussions about effective book covers and exploring the science fiction and
dystopian genres.
Since all three books in the trilogy have been consistently
on loan it is clear that he was already very popular! His other novels include The Machine, The Explorer, and I Still
Dream.
During Smythe’s visit this week, Year Seven got the chance
to hear more about what it is like being an author, screenwriter and general
ponderer of all things cosmic and curious and how Science Fiction is uncannily
good at predicting the future!
Smythe suggests that when writing about the future, authors
have to be able to come up with a creation that feels plausible to the reader:
something that is just beyond the horizon of technological, environmental,
political or cultural thinking and development.
The students were then treated to Smythe’s brief history of
the Science Fiction genre including John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1969) which predicted the first black President
of the US as a man called President Obomi!
The great Jules Verne predicted that man would visit the
moon in From the Earth to the Moon by
almost a hundred years in 1865!
And, in E. M. Forster’s The
Machine Stops (1911) the characters use a system identical to the internet
for telecommunications and more specifically, video chat! That’s just creepy.
Smythe then looked at how he accidently predicted the future
in his novel The Machine. The story
centres around a technology that allows humans to change neural pathways to
forget past traumas.
Meanwhile, in real life, researchers at the OpenWorm project
were trying to create a digital version of an actual nemotode worm in a
computer. This process is still being undertaken and they have only managed to
create a series of digital processes that mimic the natural workings of the
worm's neural networks. Too close for comfort.
In his book No Harm
Can Come to a Good Man there are companies that try to predict the future
based on history. This same idea is being used at the moment by FiveThirtyEight
to predict the outcome of the World Cup, something the Year Sevens were very
interested in!
Towards the end of the visit, Smythe spoke about his young
adult Australia Trilogy: Way Down Dark, Long Dark Dusk and Dusk Made
Dawn. In this series he looks at whether you can change the course of your
life if you have grown up being told that you are a bad person. He spoke about
how the future he presents in these books can seem frightening and oppressive
but if you look at the way things are in the world right now it might not be
that far-fetched.
The closing student Q&A was enthusiastic and varied with
someone asking Smythe about the Bechdel Test and how it is used in his writing,
whether there would be a film of the Australia books, and whether he was
working on any other films (something he was remarkable tight lipped about). Watch
this space…
Year Seven really enjoyed their visit from JP Smythe. It was
a fascinating look at Science Fiction and how books can be used to show truths
about where the world around us is heading. He gave them a lot to think about
and a lot of suggested reading for the summer break. We are now all really
looking forward to reading Way Down Dark
(Australia Book 1) …..when we can wrestle it off the students!