Schedule of readings:
Assigned readings should be completed before the scheduled date. Most assigned readings not included in the books ordered for the class are available as pdf files on the “Files” page of the Canvas site for the class (see the left margin of the Canvas front page for the “Files” link). Essays available in the Latham anthology are labelled as such (please note that ebook versions of the Latham are available through the UW libraries). Alternately, some short works are available online, at the links in the schedule of readings below. Suggested readings are not required but are instead provided as extra reading on topics that will be touched on in class; I will usually refer to those readings, but I will not assume that students have already read the suggested works.
Week 1. Critical frameworks and debates
January 4: Introduction to the course
Darko Suvin, chapters 1 and 4 from Metamorphoses of Science Fiction
Carl Freedman, “Science Fiction and Critical Theory” (in Latham)
Arthur Clarke, “Reunion”
Fredric Brown, “Preposterous”
“The Communications Officer’s Tale” (Rheanna, “Lunch and Other Obscenities”) in Francesca Coppa, ed., The Fanfiction Reader
Suggested only: Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique”
Suggested only: Mikhail Bakhtin/P.N. Medvedev, excerpt from The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship
Suggested only: Samuel R. Delany, “About 5750 Words” (in Latham)
Week 2.
January 9: Steven Shaviro, “Thinking Like a Philosopher,” from Discognition
Rachel Swirsky, “Eros, Philia, Agape”
Gwyneth Jones, “Metempsychosis of the Machine”
John Rieder, “Introduction: The Colonial Gaze and the Frame of Science Fiction,” from Colonialism and Science Fiction
Robert Sheckley, “The Native Problem”
Suggested only: Ray Bradbury, “Way Up in the Middle of the Air”
Suggested only: Poul Anderson, “The Disinherited”
Suggested only: Frederick Pohl, “The Day After the Day the Martians Came”
January 11: Derieck Scott, “On Becoming Fantastical,” the conclusion to Keeping It Unreal
Nalo Hopkinson, “Report from Planet Midnight” (in Latham)
Kristin Mandigma, “Excerpt from a Letter by a Social-Realist Aswang”
W.E.B. DuBois, “The Comet”
Caitlin Kiernan, “The Transition of Elizabeth Haskings”
Larissa Lai, “Rachel”
Victor LaValle, “Up from Slavery”
Martin Hill Ortiz, “Ap-Hell”
Suggested only: Patrick Parrinder, “Revisiting Suvin’s Poetics of Science Fiction”
Suggested only: Brian Attebery, “Fantasy as Mode, Genre, Formula,” chapter 1 from Strategies of Fantasy
Week 3. Historical frameworks and debates
January 16: No class; MLK Day holiday
January 18: Hard SF
Judith Merril, “What Do You Mean: Science? Fiction?” (in Latham)
Hal Clement, “Proof”
Robert Heinlein, “Columbus Was a Dope”
Tom Godwin, “The Cold Equations”
Arthur Clarke, “The Sentinel”
Clifford Simak, “Desertion”
James Blish, “Watershed”
Kim Stanley Robinson, “Review: Science in the Third Millennium”
Suggested only: Isaac Asimov, “Evidence”
Suggested only: H.G. Wells, “The Limits of Individual Plasticity”
Suggested only: John W. Campbell, “Introduction” to Heinlein, The Man Who Sold the Moon
Suggested only: Robert Heinlein, “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction” (in Latham)
Suggested only: David Hartwell, “Hard SF”
Suggested only: Poul Anderson, “The Creation of Imaginary Worlds”
Suggested only: Hal Clement, “The Creation of Imaginary Beings”
Week 4.
January 23: Literary SF/New Wave
J.G. Ballard, “Which Way to Inner Space?” (in Latham)
Charles Harness, “The New Reality”
Theodore Sturgeon, “World Well Lost”
Ursula K. LeGuin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
Philip K. Dick, “The Electric Ant”
Samuel R. Delany, “Aye, and Gomorrah”
Suggested only: Alfred Bester, “Fondly Fahrenheit”
Suggested only: Thomas Disch, “The Asian Shore”
Suggested only: Leslie Fiedler, “The New Mutants”
January 25: Feminist SF
Wendy Pearson, “Alien Cryptographies: The View from Queer” (in Latham)
C.L. Moore, “No Woman Born”
Judith Merril, “That Only a Mother”
Joanna Russ, “When It Changed”
Rokeya Hossain, “Sultana’s Dream”
James M. Tiptree, Jr./Alice Sheldon, “The Women Men Don’t See”
Suggested only: Lisa Yaszek, “The Women History Doesn’t See: Recovering Midcentury Women’s SF as a Literature of Social Critique” (in Latham)
Suggested only: Sarah Lefanu, “Authority and Sentiment: Is There a Women’s Science Fiction?”
Suggested only: Karen Joy Fowler, “What I Didn’t See”
Week 5.
January 30: James M. Tiptree, Jr./Alice Sheldon, “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”
Octavia Butler, “Amnesty”
Sofia Samatar, “The Red Thread”
N.K. Jemisin, “The Ones Who Stay and Fight”
Charlie Jane Anders, “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue”
Suggested only: Jacqueline Koyanagi, “Sensorium”
Suggested only: Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto” (in Latham)
February1: Cyberpunk
Bruce Sterling, “Preface to Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology” (in Latham)
Greg Egan, “Learning to Be Me”
Bruce Sterling, “Maneki Neko”
Benjamin Rosenbaum, “The Guy Who Worked for Money,” available online at https://www.shareable.net/the-guy-who-worked-for-money/
Maureen McHugh, “A Coney Island of the Mind”
Eugie Foster, “Whatever Skin You Wear”
Malka Older, “Chapter 5: Disruption and Continuity (Excerpted)”
Suggested only: William Gibson, “Burning Chrome”
Suggested only: Pat Cadigan, “Pretty Boy Crossover”
Suggested only: N. Katherine Hayles, “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers” (in Latham)
Suggested only: Veronica Hollinger, “Cybernetic Deconstructions: Cyberpunk and Postmodernism” (in Latham)
Suggested only: Brian McHale, “Toward a Poetics of Cyberpunk”
Suggested only: Lisa Nakamura, “Cyberrace”
Week 6. Some contemporary developments
February 6: Samuel R. Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
Isiah Lavender III, “On Defining Afrofuturism”
Suggested only: Gregory Bateson, “The Cybernetics of Self”
Suggested only: Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism” (in Latham)
February 8: Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
Fredric Jameson, “Progress versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?” (in Latham)
Suggested only: Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1, chapter 17
Suggested only: Darko Suvin, chapter 3, from Metamorphoses of Science Fiction
Suggested only: Jayna Brown, “Introduction” to Black Utopias
Week 7.
February 13: Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
Mark Jerng, “Introduction” from Racial Worldmaking
Suggested only: Derieck Scott, “Fantastic Bullets,” the introduction to Keeping It Unreal
February 15: Ted Chiang, from Stories of Your Life and Others: “Understand”; “Story of Your Life”; “Liking What You See: A Documentary”; “Seventy-Two Letters”; “Tower of Babylon”
Suggested only: Ramon Saldivar, “Historical Fantasy, Speculative Realism, and Postrace Aesthetics in Contemporary American Fiction”
Week 8:
February 20: No class; Presidents’ Day holiday
February 22: Chiang, from Exhalation: “The Lifecycle of Software Objects”; “The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling”; “Exhalation”
Stephen Hong Sohn, “Alien/Asian: Imagining the Racialized Future” (in Latham)
Suggested only: Aliette de Bodard, “The Universe of Xuya,” available online at https://www.aliettedebodard.com/bibliography/novels/the-universe-of-xuya/
Suggested only: Aliette de Bodard, “Immersion,” available online at https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/debodard_06_12/
Suggested only: Aliette de Bodard, “The Waiting Stars,” available online at https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/debodard_06_17_reprint/
Suggested only: Malka Older, “Saint Path”
Week 9.
February 27: Nisi Shawl, Everfair
Tom Moylan, “The Literary Utopia,” chapter 3 from Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination
Suggested only: Ann and Jeff Vandermeer, “What is Steampunk?”
Suggested only: Brian Attebery, “Recapturing the Modern World for the Imagination,” chapter 8 in Strategies of Fantasy
March 1: Shawl, Everfair
Sami Schalk, “Introduction” to Bodyminds Reimagined
Week 10.
March 6: Shawl, Everfair
Nnedi Okorafor, “Organic Fantasy”
Vandana Singh, “A Handful of Rice”
Suggested only: Ken Liu, “Ghost Days,” available online at
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/ghost-days/
Suggested only: Farah Mendelsohn, “Introduction” to Rhetorics of Fantasy
March 8: Chelsea Vowel, “Buffalo Bird,” “Aniskohocikan,” and “I, Bison”
Drew Hayden Taylor, “I Am . . . Am I”
Rebecca Roanhorse, “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian ExperienceTM”
Suggested only: Vowel, "Michif Man"
Suggested only: Darcie Little Badger, “Né Le”
Suggested only: Grace Dillon, “Indigenous Scientific Literacies in Nalo Hopkinson’s Ceremonial Worlds” (in Latham)
Suggested only: Mark Rifkin, “Introduction” to Between Land and Flesh