The purpose of the course is twofold: to develop an account of SF as a genre and to read some of its most interesting work.   I’m currently rethinking it, so that the following description is tentative.   We’ll start with two great early texts, which set up issues that science fiction continues to confront—H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s distopia We , which responds in part to Wells' later utopian impulse.

After the initial works we'll treat the work of writers of the second half of the century who seem particularly interesting to me—in America, Phillip Dick, and Ursula Le Guin, and Octavia Butler, Suzy McKee Charness and perhaps Gene Wolfe, in England, Russell Hoban and, in Poland, Stanislaw Lem.

Scattered through the course will be pockets of short stories by Alice Sheldon (pen name James Tiptree), Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, Michael Swanwick, Gene Wolfe and others.   I'll finish by treating several novels written in the last fifteen years—certainly Maureen McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang and or Mission Child ; possibly Elizabeth Ann Scarborough's The Healer's War or Greg Bear’s City of Angels or Darwin’s Radio . There will be at least one film version of one of the novels: in the past, when I’ve taught Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep I showed Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner and may again; I’ll almost certainly show Soderbergh’s recent Solaris .

These are all rich, hard, powerful works, chosen because they need some thinking about. Certain concerns will surface in different works in different ways: encounters with aliens and, with that, the problem of what’s human; the social effects of scientific advances; the nature of gender.  

Writing.   Students will post ten ungraded one-page responses and in addition there will be two graded essays (done in draft and rewritten) and a final exam.

It's my intention to lecture for two days a week and to use the third day for discussion though we may have to modify this plan as the semester progresses.   During the semester Suzy McKee Charness and Octavia Butler will each come to a class.

One college-level literature course is a prerequisite for this class.

A Very Tentative Reading List

H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

Yevgeny Zamyatin, We                                     

Phillip Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or Ubik or The Man in the High Castle

Suzy McKee Charness, Walk to the End of the World

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed    

Stanislaw Lem, Solaris                            

Russell Hoban, Ridley Walker

Maureen McHugh, China Mountain Zhang or Mission Child

Octavia Butler, Dawn                                    

An anthology of Science Fiction Short Stories