|
 |
|
|
Seminar: Strange Neighbors
This is a reading list (several semesters, so pick and choose) plus notes for a first year seminar on alternative societies in science fiction that I taught at Muhlenberg College. The principal book for the instructor was Writing Analytically, by Jill Stephen and Dave Rosenwasser. Teaching a course without specific content was pretty scary - I usually taught chemistry, and could always rely on mountains of factual material - but Writing Analytically served as an anchor, providing examples, exercises, guidelines, and so on for teaching writing. If you don't want something that dense and challenging for the nuts and bolts part of the course, Richard Lanham's Revising Prose is more limited in scope, but very readable, superbly practical, and even humorous in places. Reading List: Blood Child - short story by Octavia Butler. Won a Hugo award, so it should be available in several compilations. Viscerally disturbing, and when you get over that, it's intellectually disturbing. Big question to ask the students, and then sit back and let them talk is: "What is the relationship between the two main characters?" That sounds lame on the surface, but slavery, incest, love, torture, marriage, child abuse, soul mates, friendship, sacrifice, public service, politics, and biological symbiosis are all DEFENSIBLE answers. Brilliant. A Beltaine and Suspenders - short story by Esther Friesner. Published originally in Fantasy and Science Fiction in November 1994. The only fantasy story in the list, this is a hilarious satire, with a lecherous vicar, pagan rites, a good sappy romance and a lot of wordplay, literary allusion, and charming British slang. Unfortunately, students don't tend to get the jokes unless you spend some time explaining the wordplay, literary allusion, and charming British slang, but go ahead and assign it anyway. Billenium - short story by J.G. Ballard. Simple, but harrowing. As population increases, people are allotted decreasing amounts of living space. Two people find a large, abandoned room. What do they do with it? "Repent, Harlequin," said the TickTock Man - short story by Harlan Ellison. Unusual among SF writers, Ellison is known principally for his short fiction, great truckloads of it, usually very dark in tone, all just as indescribably imaginative as this one. Probably half his stories could work in a course like this; this is just an example. Neuromancer - novel by William Gibson. The quintessential cyberpunk story. The students respond extremely well to this and I got several good analytical papers from them. Do not tell them that the movie The Matrix was based in part on it - I made that mistake with The Time Machine, and no one read the book because they figured they knew the story already. The Left Hand of Darkness - novel by Ursula K. LeGuin. I love this book, but I can't say the students did. The story of a human male envoy to a planet where the inhabitants are only male or female when in "heat" once a month, the anthropological detail alone is fascinating. "There's no ACTION" the students kept saying. "There's plenty of action, just no SHOOTING" I kept saying. They didn't buy it. Try, though. Literary SF doesn't get any better than this. The Postman - novel by David Brin. Yes, I know this was made into a lamentable movie - although post 9/11 maybe people would be more receptive to it - but the original book is a thought-provoking treatise on the nature and importance of myth, personal responsibility, and hope in the (re)construction of a country. Not so perfect in structure or characterization as the above two novels, it's still a compelling read. If you don't have time for the whole book, try the original (Hugo-winning) novella of the same title, which covers about the first third of the novel. It appeared in Asimov's SF Magazine, but I don't remember which year. The Uplift War - novel by David Brin. This is one of several books in Brin's Uplift series, and it fits right in to a course on alternative societies. There must be a dozen carefully delineated intelligent species in this novel, all backstabbing each other while pretending to get along, all with wildly different and intricately weird societies. Queen of Angels - novel by Greg Bear. A long, dense, complicated novel that turned out to be too much for first year students, but may work for upperclassmen. Are there others with potential? You bet. Hundreds of them. If Frank Herbert's The Dosadi Experiment had been in print, I'd have used it in a second. (What happens when you take "street smarts" to their logical extreme?) Fortunately it is now available in a reprint edition. Use it. Arthur Clarke's The City and the Stars (city vs. country - the two cultures) has also been recently reprinted. If you're considering Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale, please substitute For the Sake of Grace instead: same general topic (the systematic cultural oppression of women) but more realistic, better written, shorter, more frightening, and more cautionary. It's by Suzette Haden Elgin, and is reprinted in the Norton Book of Science Fiction.
|
