Class Schedule
NOTE: CLASS DRAFT-EXCHANGE FOLDER IS HERE
Week of January 9
Day One: What is Science Fiction? What is Fantasy? What is not? Handouts to be distributed in class. Prof's notes from the whiteboard here.
Day Two: Anderson, "Rock Paper Scissors," Brazeal F, "Perchance to Dream," Bisson, T. "Meat" & Quifan, "Let There Be Light," (if you do not see all the text, click when you arrive to display the entire texts of each story). I will bring a few printed copies to use in class. In-class writing practice.
If you want to take a peek, there's an excellent short film of Bisson's story emphasizing its innate humor here. I also like this second film here that comes across as cold and scary and sad, all at once.
Week of January 16
Day One: Bear, E. "Tideline" (in Hartwell and Hayden Anthology). Model for how to do close reading & a response for me, with a focus on the language & symbolism writers use. Presentation.
Day Two: Doctorow, C. "Chicken Little" (in Hartwell and Hayden Anthology). In class work on a close-reading exercise as a big group, focusing on the characters and their actions/words.
Week of January 23
Day One: McDonald, I. Luna: New Moon. Chs. 1-4 (and check the glossary at the back when a term confuses you...imporant!)
Cady Cummins, our Writing Consultant, will come to class to meet you. First of our daily writing responses in class.
Day Two: McDonald, I. Luna: New Moon Ch. 5
Friday, noon: Each student should decide which of the in-class writing to submit for a grade. E-mail me your choice with date.
Week of January 30
Day One: McDonald, I. Luna: New Moon Chs. 6-9
Day Two: McDonald, I. Luna: New Moon Chs. 10-end. If you want to learn about The Long Now Foundation's projects, have a look here.
Friday, noon: Each student should decide which of the in-class writing to submit for a grade. E-mail me your choice with date. ALSO by e-mail to me: your Bias Statement about the First Paper topic. Late or missing? -5 points from the paper one grade.
Week of February 6
Day One: LeGuin, U. The Wizard of Earthsea, Chs 1-4. PLEASE also read over topics for paper one and bring questions to me by e-mail or if of use to the whole class, to class.
Day Two: LeGuin, U. The Wizard of Earthsea. Chs 5-6
Friday, noon: Each student should decide which of the in-class writing to submit for a grade. E-mail me your choice with date. Also Draft of paper one due by noon. DOCUMENT MUST be Word attachment sent to my UR e-mail or a shared Google file (share with joe.essid@gmail.com). No PDFs, please.
Meetings with Writing Consultants (sign up here) begin Sunday and continue through next week. -10 points if you miss the meeting. SIGN UP SHEET is here.
Week of February 13
Day One: LeGuin, U. The Wizard of Earthsea, Chs. 7 end + afterword
Day Two: Cooper, B. "Savant Songs" (in Hartwell and Hayden Anthology). A Physicist explains String Theory in very simple (but spooky) terms.
Friday, noon: Each student should decide which of the in-class writing to submit for a grade. E-mail me your choice with date.
Week of February 20
Day One: Liu, The Algorithms for Love" (in Hartwell and Hayden Anthology). And see this clip from The Matrix, but for your own sake during the cold light of day and not right before bedtime. "Welcome to the Desert of the Real."
Day Two: Roose, K. "Bing's A.I. Chat: 'I Want to be Alive.' "
Friday, noon:Each student should decide which of the in-class writing to submit for a grade. E-mail me your choice with date. Revision of Paper One due to me as an e-mail link (to your Google Doc) or Word Doc. No PDFs, please.
Week of February 27
Day One: Johnson, A. "Third Day Lights." (in Hartwell and Hayden Anthology).
Day Two: Lovecraft, H.P. "Dreams in the Witch House" online here. Q for group work: Find one moment in the story that either 1) breaks with the conventions YOU expect from horror or 2) uses those conventions. Why? (Lovecraft's work usually gets described as foundational to modern horror by folks like Stephen King, China Mieville, Guillermo del Toro, and others).
Friday, noon: Each student should decide which of the in-class writing to submit for a grade. E-mail me your choice with date.
Week of March 6
Spring Break
Week of March 13
Day One: Wilde, F. The Fire Opal Mechanism, read up to page 105.
Day Two: Wilde, F. The Fire Opal Mechanism up to page 181.
Friday, noon: Each student should decide which of the in-class writing to submit for a grade. E-mail me your choice with date.
Week of March 20
Day One: Wilde, F. The Fire Opal Mechanism to end. Class Visit by Fran Wilde. Bring to class question for the author. E-mail me ahead too with the question, so I can put them into one document. OPTIONAL: 9am-10:15 Bagels, coffee, and fiction workshop with Ms. Wilde, Humanities Commons (2nd floor). Bring a piece of speculative fiction (horror, SF, Fantasy, slipstream) to workshop. Her topic is "Writing across genres and ages," and you can bring an outline or idea, or a complete or unfinished story.
Day Two: Mandel, E. Station Eleven, Parts I & 2 (up to page 67).
Friday, noon: make any changes to Station Eleven responses. These will be graded.
Week of March 27
Day One: Mandel, E. Station Eleven. up to Ch. 36 (p. 188). We will do passages in groups, but first this Q for entire class:
Why is Miranda's comic important to this novel? She tells Pablo, "You don't have to understand it," she said, "It's mine" (87).
Group passages:
"We stand it because we were younger than you when everything ended. . . .Because we are always looking for the former world, before all the traces of the former world are gone" (130).
"There have been four times," she said, "in all these years, when Symphony members have become separated from the Symphony, and in every single instance they have followed the separation protocol, and we've been reunited at the destination" (138).
"You probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially." What was it in this statement that made Clark want to weep? (163).
"There's still a world out there," Jeevan said, "outside this apartment."
"I think there's just survival out there, Jeevan. I think you should go out there and try to survive" (183).
Day Two: Mandel, E. Station Eleven. up to Ch. 48 (p. 283).
Friday, noon: Each student should decide which of the in-class writing to submit for a grade. E-mail me your choice with date.
Week of April 3
Day One: Mandel, E. Station Eleven. To End
Day Two: Butler, O. "Speech Sounds"
Friday, noon: Each student should decide which of the in-class writing to submit for a grade. E-mail me your choice with date.
Week of April 10 Meetings with Writing Consultants start Monday the 17th (-10 points if you skip your meeting)
Day One: Gibson, W. "Hinterlands"
Day Two: Lingen, M. "The Calculus Plague" (in Hartwell and Hayden Anthology).
Draft of Paper 2 Due by start of class. -10 points if you do not turn in a draft. No bias statement due this time. DOCUMENT MUST be Word attachment sent to my UR e-mail or a shared Google file (share with joe.essid@gmail.com). No PDFs, please. Sign up for a time with your Consultant here.
Friday, noon: Each student should decide which of the in-class writing to submit for a grade. E-mail me your choice with date.
Week of April 17
Day One: Lovecraft, H.P., "The Dunwich Horror" (not to be read late at night, please)
Day Two: Levine, D. "Tk, tk, tk" (in Hartwell and Hayden Anthology).
Friday, noon: Each student should decide which of the in-class writing to submit for a grade. E-mail me your choice with date.
Sunday April 23rd, 8pm: Revision of Paper two due by e-mail to me (word attachment or link to Google Doc) no later than 5pm on Friday, April 21. Late? See class policies.
Last Day of Fall Classes: Friday April 21 Don't forget your course Evaluations!
BEYOND?
Some of these books we have just read, read in other sections, or might read in the future! All these deeply influenced my reading and thinking.
Anderson, M.T. Feed. Perhaps the saddest look at what being addicted to the Internet, ignoring environmental problems, and competing for college admissions means. It's a YA book but one of the darkest I've ever seen. Cyberpunk with a teenage twist.
Atwood, M. Oryx & Crake. This post-human tale of a collapsed civilization, genetic engineering run amok, and an unrecognizable ecosystem should keep you up at night.
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 an existential mood (it has its own adjective, "Ballardian") 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! Ballard is the Paul Bowles (look it up) of SF.
Bester, A. The Stars My Destination. One of the most influential space-travel tales of the 1950s, with a stunningly depicted antihero. Tied with Dune as my favorite SF novel, ever. Has not aged well, and can be accused of misogyny for its treatment of female characters.
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.
Delany, S. Dhalgren. Not for the faint of heart or lazy 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. Hated by many SF fans for its homoerotic passages and graphic sex.
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.
Herbert, F. Dune. Widely regarded as one of the finest--if not THE finest--SF novel of all time. Certainly mine, tying with Bester's novel. Imagine the burden, and outcome, of a young aristocrat doomed to be a prophet of a new religion, one that would reshape the entire galaxy? George Lucas mined this book for many ideas in Star Wars, but let's be charitable. If Dune is to SF what The Lord of the Rings books are to fantasy, who can blame Lucas? Every fantasy novel lives in Tolkien's long shadow.
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, when 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. Just behind Dune and The Stars My Destination as my favorite SF novel.
Mano, D. The Bridge. Odd for a professor who is a radical environmentalist to recommend an SF work that attacks ecology? Done. It's such a clever novel with a terrifying vision, one of a totalitarian ecological government and its eventual fall. My obsession with this book all began with the cover that I saw, as a kid, in a drug-store book rack. It disturbed me so much that I could not buy it. Decades later, I somehow tracked it down. It may be out of print but worth the effort to find.
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." Also his Embassytown about contact with an alien race gone wrong because of language-differences.
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, a 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. Read Moorcock's Hawkmoon books for a lighter (even funny) fantasy world set in an alternative-timeline Europe (the evil emperor of Gran Bretan gets depicted as a giant embryo in a fish tank).
Pohl, F. Gateway. Humanity finds a gate to intersteller space (long before Mass Effect) and a fleet of long-abandonned ships for traveling through it. What could possibly go wrong? Rousing, thought-provoking stuff before the game or William Gibson's story "Hinterlands" sometimes taught in this class.
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.
Smith, Cordwainer. Read pretty much anything you can find by this 50s visionary. Mostly it will be short fiction full of proto-humans, time-inversions, and strange ways to travel through space. My favorites are "Alpha-Ralpha Boulevard", "Under Old Earth," and "Game of Rat and Dragon."
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 lifeforms they thought to be just animals.
Turtledove, H. Guns of The South. An alternative-history novel that begins in 1864, as Grant's army prepares to crush Lee's in Virginia. Strangers arrive peddling rifles to the Confederates. It's a new design, they say: the AK-47.
Wells, H.G. The Island of Doctor Moreau and The Invisible Man. Moreau is my favorite, after the two we read in class in years past: War of the Worlds and The Time Machine. Moreau launched the entire genre of fiction that looks at genetic engineering, in a way that Atwood had to acknowledge in Oryx and Crake.