Fall 2017 Schedule

BEYOND? The books we did not read but might next time; you asked about a

reading list! All these books deeply influenced my reading and thinking.

• Asimov, I. The Foundation Trilogy. Big-picture galactic history by another master of "hard SF." A trilogy that spans generations.

• Bacigalupi, P. The Windup Girl. Ecological SF of the first order, set a hundred or so years after the collapse of the global economy from an energy crisis and climate change. A new economy has emerged, based upon genetic engineering, muscle-powered technology, artificial humans, and global "calorie companies." A popular read from my last section.

• Ballard, J.G. The Complete Stories. My favorite author of short fiction. He captures a mood that is hard to define. I love his series of tales about a place called Vermillion Sands and best of all, his stories about the end of the Space Age. Wild and psychologically gripping or cool and surreal. Sometimes all of the above!

• Bester, A. The Stars My Destination. One of the most influential space-travel tales of the 1950s, with a stunningly depicted antihero. We led off with this book in my last section.

• Butler, O. The Parable of the Sower. In a time of social collapse, a new religion and a hope for human destiny among the stars, all in the heart of a teenage girl. Upbeat and dark? Yes, it is.

• Clarke, A. Childhood's End. One of the best pieces of SF about contact and human evolution ever written.

• Cook, G. A Shadow of All Night Falling. Wonderful modern fantasy in a compelling world with quite the backstory. It's the first of a series of novels.

• Delaney, S. Dhalgren. Not for the faint of heart or weak of brain. It's an experimental epic novel about a collapsed city in the midst of an otherwise normal 1970s America. A tough read but worth it. William Gibson said you don't read it so much as enter it, like a new climate.

• Gibson, W. Neuromancer. My favorite (and the grandpa of) cyberpunk novels. Rogue AIs, console cowboys, and street samurai mingle in a future of human-machine symbiosis and megacorporations. Cool and sharp as a razor.

• Halderman, J. The Forever War. My favorite piece of military SF; profoundly antiwar but not naively so. It's a great answer to Robert Heinlein's book Starship Troopers, which is, I'll admit, a guilty pleasure of mine.

• James. P.D. The Children of Men. James was a mystery writer yet she crafted one brilliant SF novel. Humanity has not been able to conceive children for 25 years for reasons unknown, then a woman becomes pregnant. The world and the outcome of her life are really well handled.

• LeGuin, U. The Left Hand of Darkness. One of the finest SF novels of all time, and a centerpiece of my first SF class at UR. It focuses on the ways an ambassador from Earth encounters a civilization where social norms, progress, and gender are vastly different.

  • Miéville, C. Perdido Street Station. Not SF but the start of a trilogy about the richly imagined world of Bas-Lag. Prime example of the what the author calls "weird fiction."

• Moorcock, M. The Elric Novels. These are, in part, the author's riposte to Lord of the Rings: darker, wicked, perverted, even. Our hero is not Aragorn the Returning King or even Christlike Frodo: we have Elric, an sadistic albino and kin-slayer, King of a dying realm in a decaying civilization at world's end, on the brink of descent into Chaos. Happy stuff, but oh so well written. Worth reading alone for Stormbringer, Elric's evil and intelligent sword that drinks souls. It's not Aragorn's sword, to be sure...nor Middle Earth.

• Russell, M.D. The Sparrow & The Children of God. As rich a world as LeGuin's Winter but here the Catholic Church sends a mission to an alien civilization and things do not go well for the Jesuits. It's a powerful set of books about religion, a sense of mission, and the destiny of an oppressed people.

• Stewart, G. Earth Abides. A small community of people gather in the Oakland Hills after a plague decimates 99% of us. Can they rebuild a civilization? If so, what does one choose to have survive?

• Tepper, S. Grass. Ecologically themed work about a human colony with real problems concerning the indigenous animals they thought to be just animals.

• Wells, H.G. The Island of Doctor Moreau and The Invisible Man. Moreau is my favorite, after the two we read. It launched the entire genre of fiction that looks at genetic engineering, in a way that Atwood had to acknowledge in Oryx and Crake.