English 208b SF - Science Fiction? Speculative Fiction?

William Oram

MWF 10:00 -10:50 a.m.

 

   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, 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—probably Maureen McHugh's China Mountain Zhang and Elizabeth Moon's The Speed of Dark and Andrea Hairston's new novel, Mindscape . There will be at least one film version of one of the novels: when I've taught Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep I showed Ridley Scott's Bladerunner .

 

  These are all rich, hard, powerful works, chosen because they need some thinking about. Certain concerns will surface in different works in different ways: the social effects of scientific advances; utopias and distopias; encounters with aliens and, with that, the problem of what's human; the nature of gender. By and large I'm interested in novels that investigate what Ursula Le Guin calls the “inner space” of mind and society, not the “outer space” of the cosmos. But there are space ships.

 

  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 Andrea Hairston will talk to the class.

 

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

 

A 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 Dispossessed

Stanislaw Lem, Solaris

Maureen McHugh, China Mountain Zhang

Octavia Butler, Dawn

Hairston, Mindscape

An anthology of science fiction short stories