What Belongs In a High School Sci-Fi/Fantasy Lit Class? 1021
flogger writes "I have been asked to help develop a literature course for Science Fiction and Fantasy literature. What do you consider to be appropriate selections of short stories and novels in these genres for high school students of all ability levels? I'd also like to know why you choose certain selections. This class will be 'regular' class and not a class for 'flunkies' to earn a credit by sitting docile and listening to lectures. The following is a course description that I have been given as a guideline. This description can change. Any ideas? 'In this Junior/Senior level course, students will focus on the genres of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Students will survey the histories of these genres and recognize how world events have been reflected onto other worlds. From the early formation of the genre, with Verne, and the classics of Clarke, Tolkien, Bradbury, and LeGuin, to the contemporary works of Card, Jordan, and Vinge, the genres have been about portraying humanity in possible scenarios. These works have mirrored events throughout the troubled situations of our history and provided optimistic outcomes and horrifying predictions. Through this course, students will utilize analytical skills and reading strategies to evaluate our current situation and project into the literature of different worlds while sharing and learning of an author's insight. Possible areas of interest will be topics of the environment, energy conservation, war, social issues, and others. '"
Let the students... (Score:2, Interesting)
How SF has changed with the Times (Score:3, Interesting)
It would be interesting to emphasize how SF has evolved with society. From Vern and Wells in Victorian Europe, to Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" and "Stranger in a Strange Land", which demonstrate both sides of American culture in the 1960's. John Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar" is a terrific period piece, and Zelazny's "Lord of Light" is also a blast.
In my view, SF took a serious downward turn from the early 1980's, but there are exceptions, to be sure. With the entire range of SF at your disposal, there's no reason to select junk when there are so many gifted authors to study.
Re:Some More Names to Consider (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't forget Animal Farm.
Re:Enders Game... (Score:1, Interesting)
For the love of god, no!
Re:Let the students... (Score:3, Interesting)
As much as I want to agree, I just can't. Any liturature class should be about exposing the students to works that they would probably not have discovered on their own. If you only have them read what they like, they would have read it without the class anyway. I definately feel that giving them a choice has a place in such a class, but more like something to do at the end, and have them write a report comparing and contrasting the 'classics' with their choice of book.
Rendezvous with Rama (Score:4, Interesting)
Rendezvous with Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke. Great novel the perfectly fits the classic sci-fi genre and deals with the "what if" of alien contact and how it could possibly come about. It has ties to biblical stories (eg: Noah's ark) and packs quite a bit of detail (physics, biology, computers, etc.) into a fairly easy read. Rama II was a decent followup and goes more into social issues, but the subsequent novels go progressively downhill and are only worth reading just to find out what happens.
A few other names to consider... (Score:3, Interesting)
You can get more people reading if you give them books that will catch there interest. Throwing Dune and Stranger in a Strange Land might scare off some newer readers...so it's always good to get some sort of a tie-in that they can relate to...and a good example of that would be Robert J. Sawyer's Flashfoward , which has the tie-in of the TV series based upon it. This leads to all sorts of great discussion topics for students about how Media interacts with Art.
Another to consider is Cory Doctorow's Little Brother . In this book, the main chracactors are high school students dealing with both mundane questions of teenage life, and fairly deep questions about freedom, authority and technology. And the technology is current, so that it will appeal greatly to today's high school i/n/m/a/t/e/s/ students.
Stross (Score:3, Interesting)
Accelerando - Charlie Stross
simply superb! :)
Cold Equations (Score:5, Interesting)
"The Cold Equations" a short story by Tom Godwin (wiki'd the author). It's been 40 years and I still remember the story, that says something. I remember hating the story, because unlike most pulp SF at the time, it didn't have a happy ending; in fact I cried.
I hated it, and I recommend it. You'll hate it too.
Re:Robert Heinlein! (Score:3, Interesting)
short stories (Score:3, Interesting)
Stick to short stories, exclusively or almost exclusively. Short stories have always been the medium which best captures SF, gets to the point the, "here's an idea, let's explore it some" nature of SF, while when things expand out to novel size it loses some of that (in spite of many great SF novels).
Plus, doing short stories makes it easier to keep people's attention, and less likely to lose people who've fallen a few chapters behind in the reading. Either you've read the story or you haven't. Changing stories day by day / week by week / whatever means you can get different styles in that appeal to different kids and break any monotony. It also gives you more flexibility to change your mind about course direction in the middle-if it seems like a good time to change direction, you don't have to finish slogging through the current novel first.
Also, you're not going to be able to cover the span of what you'd like to cover in one class, you'll have to leave things out. If you go with novels, you'll have to leave more things out.
Harry Turtledove's Alternate Histories (Score:2, Interesting)
You've already got Asimov and Clarke and all the big classics. Of these, I personally recommend The Edge of Tomorrow, a collection of Asimov essays and short stories, before you get them started on the full-length novels. It was my first Asimov book, back in middle school, and it has all of the best short stories that you'll want to include. "The Last Question" in particular can spawn a number of discussions, on religion, on human nature, and even on Asimov's projection of the development of technology.
Because this class is suppose to be educational, Harry Turtledove's alternate histories are a great option- they require the students to learn the details of our own history before they can understand what makes the alternate realities in these books tick. It also challenges them to view actual history as something more than a series of names and dates; a concept my teachers in high school never bothered with.
Escape Pod podcast. (Score:3, Interesting)
The best free sci-fi on podcast I've come across is from Escape Pod.
Currently at about 200 short stories narrated often by the original authors, includes original and award winning works. Kudos to the guy who does it. I've stopped listening now I dont drive 2 hours a day to work and back.
http://escapepod.org/ [escapepod.org]
Each is between 30 mins and an hour or so, reading, mostly non-dramaticized.
Re:Some More Names to Consider (Score:3, Interesting)
Clifford Simak would be a good one for the 40/50's. Most of his sci-fi is rural/laid-back and while his heros are like cardboard, his aliens have depth.
Goblin Reservation is a sci-fi/fantasy mashup where somebody has to solve his own murder in a future where time-travel is used to settle educational disputes and science has found where fantasy creatures were hiding.
The Visitors covers our interaction with incomprehensible aliens that turn trees into easy to drive flying saucers, ruining the autoindustry. It isn't a trade, they eat cellulose and literly shit cars with idiot-proof antigravity.
Re:Where was this class for me? (Score:3, Interesting)
I am quite fond of Roger Zelazny's short story "The Game of Blood and Dust". It didn't resonate at all with my daughter, who never really lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation. It's included in _The_Last_Defender_of_Camelot_, and only 5 pages long.
Re:Where was this class for me? (Score:5, Interesting)
I actually took a sci-fi and fantasy class in my high school back in 1988. We read starship troopers, the hobbit, lord of the rings (we had to pick one of the three), 2001, and some books of our choosing. I chose soylent green iirc. We watched a few sci-fi movies. The teacher did an in-class analysis of the complexity of the lights and buttons of darth vader's suit as he progressed through 4, 5, and 6. We did a few book reports and some art projects. I did a poster of the horses in the river that did in the ring wraiths. It was one of the few brights spots of my high school experience. The teacher was awesome.
Re:Robert Heinlein! (Score:4, Interesting)
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
IMO, his most interesting story looking at how the full spectrum of basics that a society has to provide -- air, food, shelter, marriage, child-rearing, allocation of scarce resources -- might change under suddenly different circumstances. The technology is comprehensible to almost anyone. And kids in high school today may live long enough to see computers that pass a Turing test -- certainly more likely to see that than FTL space flight. Start from "Does an AI that passes such a test have any rights?" and you can take the discussion anywhere.
Never mind the fiction, where's the analysis? (Score:2, Interesting)
If this is really a serious course in SF/F lit, what texts are you using from the analysis side? They'll give you a good guide to what stories/novels you should be looking at.
It's been a long time since I took such a course, so I don't know if Hartwell's 1984 Age of Wonders ("a penetrating exploration of the realities behind the history, development and current popularity of science fiction") or Ketterer's New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature (1974) are still in print. They're authors worth looking for, anyway. There are also more popular studies such as Brian Aldiss's Billion Year Spree or James Gunn's various works on the history of science fiction. Speaking of the latter, you might also check with the Center for the Study of Science Fiction [ku.edu] at the University of Kansas, seems like an excellent resource for what you want.
(Personally I'd argue that unless you're doing a compare-and-contrast, the science fiction and fantasy genres are so different (excluding space fantasy like Star Wars, here) that they probably ought not be studied together. It's almost like a course on "Romances and Thrillers" - yeah there are some common elements, but....)
Re:Where was this class for me? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why would they leave out Card and Heinlein if their goal was liberal indoctrination? The philosophy Starship Troopers is so easy to destroy the average middle schooler could do it. And practically every novel Card has ever written contains a sympathetic gay character who is persecuted, and yet, is content with that persecution. You could write a dissertation on that man's self-hating closet conservatism.
I had this class... (Score:3, Interesting)
I was fortunate enough to have taken a science fiction class in high school. I'd recommend nearly all of the books we covered:
Starship Troopers (Heinlein)
Childhood's End (Clarke)
Dune (Herbert)
A Canticle for Leibowitz (Miller)
Space Merchants (Pohl/Kornbluth)
Ender's Game (Card)
Those are the ones I remember that I would recommend. The only other novel I recall from the class was Earth Abides by George Stewart, but I detested it.
I'm sure there are any number of books you could add (I think there must have been something from Asimov that we read, but I don't recall what), but that was a pretty good crop with decent variety, and didn't include some of the other classics that the students have read/will read in other classes (like Fahrenheit 451 and 1984). We also did a couple movies (Star Wars as a framework for the traditional hero's journey, Independence Day because it was new and big [a friend and I wrote a tongue-in-cheek paper claiming that Independence Day was actually about the spread of the evil that was AOL, spread by those pesky disks]). We also did a few short stories: A Sound of Thunder, Prospector's Special, and some story where an architect builds a crazy multidimensional house that collapses in on itself stick in my mind.
I'm not sure what I'd go to for the fantasy portion of such a class. Tolkien of course, but after that it becomes much more difficult - there are a lot of science fiction books that are stand-alone, but with fantasy a lot of the better ones I've read are part of a series, and it becomes difficult to identify one book from a series that really encompasses everything you want to include. Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea books are great (and the first three are quite short, so you might even be able to fit them all in), maybe The Riddlemaster of Hed by Patricia McKillip (sp?).
Re:Some More Names to Consider (Score:4, Interesting)
H.P. Lovecraft. I don't think that can be stressed enough. He is so often times overlooked or pigeonholed into the same horror category as Poe, but he really did help to lay alot of the foundation for good science fiction. His later works are especially of a cosmic scale, where ancient occult gods are nothing more than misunderstood alien entities. Some stories are much more obvious in their influence however, such as At the Mountains of Madness and certainly The Shadow Out of Time.
I certainly think that the major "dystopian" novels should be covered as well, such as 1984, Brave New World, and maybe even Stranger in a Strange Land.
Re:Where was this class for me? (Score:1, Interesting)
The big problem here is that SF has several potential objectives.
One is to comment/explore the human condition or on a particular general issue of morality. SF is often a good medium for this, since one can often examine the issues in forms that cannot be encountered in the present world, or might be physically imposible in the real world, by hypothosizing a specific peice of technology.
Another is to pre-explore possible future technologies, and see just what the implications are, what the benefits and pitfalls could be, and any technology specific ethical issues. (Ethics of cloning has been very popular here).
There are several other possible objectives, including of course just plain entertainment.
However, Idiots keep conflating science fiction and fantasy. They are quite different. Science fantasy should be based fairly rigidly on the real laws of science, although in a few cases deliberately ignoring or changing a small number of them.
Fantasy on the other hand generally throws away the laws of science nearly completely, allowing just about anything, although quite frequently with a grounding in mythology, including magic, wizards, werewolves, and other mythical concepts. There is rarely any evidence of a boundary on what is possible, although authors generally do a decent job of preventing things from getting too implausible.
Now, may authors will write both Science Fiction and fantasy. I have no idea why, but it is true. Some will even mix the two in a single book, such as Frank Herbet's Dune, which is a fantasy taking place in SF style future universe.
When people say Science Fiction/Fantasy, they are probably really meaning to say Speculative Fiction (despite Heinlein's definition, Fantasy is most certainly a form of speculative fiction), as opposed to Historical Fiction, or Realistic Fiction (a term almost never used outside of grade-school education, but in which the vast majority of fictional works lie. Most Romance, Detective, Thriller, Mystery, Crime, Murder, and Political Fiction works fall clearly into this category, since the events described could really happen, albeit often quite improbable.).
Politics and contemporaneous fiction (Score:3, Interesting)
You and I may have strong feelings about politics, but high school students will be indifferent and oblivious. How much danger does one high school class represent? Exposing students to readings will be a very ineffective way of 'political indoctrination'. Get a grip. Effective 'indoctrination' requires a real life figure, such as Rush Limbaugh, or Glenn Beck.
If I were selecting a syllabus for the class, I'd go for variety and then compare and contrast the works. Understanding certain works of science fiction requires some understanding of the mood of the times.
I am personally fascinated with the post-WWII era and the existentialism that the GI's were bringing home from the war. Authoritarianism was a prevailing cultural theme from the war right on through to the 60's, contrasted by the counter-cultural existentialism and the 'beats'.
L. Ron Hubbard would be an example of the Authoritarian type, with his tendency to reinvent words to form a group-speak, bending meaning. Very 1984. 'Typewriter in the Sky' is typical of Hubbard's pseudo-psychological style.
Aldous Huxley's 1945 The Perennial Philosophy would be a good counterpoint.
Re:Where was this class for me? (Score:3, Interesting)
Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
I'd also recommend reading through some anthologies you like and looking for good short stories. If I were running the class I'd go with (depending on time) two or three good novel length selections and fill the rest in with short stories from a variety of authors. At that level I'd rather get them exposed to a variety rather than focusing on a narrower selection. Show them the different styles and genres and the different colors of sci-fi fantasy.
I'd shy away from LOTR. They already know it pretty much and its long.
Also I'd look for local authors, especially those still alive, and show off some of their work. Also if you can ask them if they might be willing to speak. Putting someone local or from a similar background as the students as a writer might also help them identify better with the medium and they may be much more interested in it if they think they might just be able to do it someday.
Finally hit the magazine rack for articles short stories and such. Analog and others may well offer some very good starting points. Also they'd help show the kids that it is an on-going process not some musty cannon of work.
Forget Novels - go for shorts (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Whoa.. stop! (Score:3, Interesting)
Au contraire (thanks 7th grade French for teaching me that phrase)
If it's taught well, that is. Make it clear to kids that having opinions about the stuff you read is important, that they aren't too stupid to understand it, and that the knowledge they gain from reading and interpreting this stuff will inform the rest of their lives. I still have memories of my discussions in a course about Beowulf.
As for what to read, I suggest looking at Hugo winners, many of which can be found in Isaac Asimov's brilliantly titled anthology The Hugo Winners. In fact, if you have to choose an anthology reader in order to keep a curriculum committee happy, I'd choose that one. The older volumes in particular have some classics and an interesting mix of authors, styles, and subject matter.
And I thoroughly disagree with the idea that SF is about technology. It isn't: It's nearly always about people, pulled into a completely different environment perhaps, but people nonetheless. Even the "aliens" aren't so much completely alien as they are an aspect of people blown way out of proportion in order to examine it and make a point about it.
Re:Where was this class for me? (Score:2, Interesting)
The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester. Perhaps Bester's best-known story (Bester won the very first Hugo award for best science fiction novel with The Demolished Man - which is a great exploration of a telepathic society cast as a detective story - but Stars is a short novel, which would allow you to fit more works into the time allotted), it's a story of one man's thirst for revenge (always a popular theme with teenagers) in a society where interplanetary travel is commonplace and most normal people have learned to teleport. The fact that the action takes place across this society's class structure, and that it anticipates (among other phenomena) flash mobs, excellently illustrates the science-fictional task of worldbuilding at its highest level.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert A. Heinlein. Although less popular than the author's Stranger in a Strange Land, it won - and deserved - the Hugo for Best Novel. More importantly, Heinlein's infamous didacticism is dialed back a good ways from the wildly-self-indulgent Stranger, and the story - of a lunar penal colony (most of the residents of which are prisoners only of irreversible gravity-mediated physiological changes) which fights a war for political independence from Earth - was the first SF novel to deal with low-gravity disability, the first that I know of to introduce a self-aware computer character that felt in any way "real", the first to introduce railgun bombardment from space as a terror weapon, and one of the first to explore (in Heinlein's holographic fashion) the possible impact on marriage customs of a society where the male-to-female ratio is heavily lopsided.
Lord of Light, by Roger Zelazny. Although best known for his less-ambitious Amber series, this was Zelazny's magnum opus. Set on a planet colonized centuries before, it tells the story of the struggle between Buddhism and Hinduism - except that the Hindu gods are the officers of the original colony ship, the Buddha is a rebel from their ranks who is determined to destroy the caste system over which they rule, and physical reincarnation is a reward doled out by the "gods" via cloning and mind-transfer technology. Beautifully-written (as you might expect from an English major with a degree in comparative mythology), it's also a riveting adventure story, with a complex protagonist fighting to overthrow an authoritarian society ruled by his oldest friends and associates, Lord of Light is perhaps the best melding of science fiction and fantasy ever written. It deservedly won both the Hugo (given by the fan community) and the Nebula (bestowed by the science fiction writers association) awards for best novel.
The Adolescence of P1, by Thomas Ryan. Other than Mistress, this was the first SF novel to explore the idea of a self-aware computer consciousness arising from what today we would call a self-modifying Internet worm. It confines itself to that theme, rather than engaging in a major world-building exercise. Because it is set in the "present day" 1980's, it would allow you to introduce the idea that science fiction themes can be set in familiar, rather than exotic surroundings without in any way lessening their entertainment value or the relevance and weight of their themes.
The Shockwave Rider, by John Brunner. Set in a highly-mobile future society that's dependent on networked computers for day-to-day existence - a society that bears a striking resemblance to our own - Rider is one of the best examples of dead-on prognosticating in SF. It's also a breathless adventure, which pits the whiz-kid hacker protagonist against the evil CIA that's been determined to exploit him and orphans like him since his childhood. Again, as in Ryan's Adolescence, Brunner includes an emergent computer intelligence given birth by the protagonist's experiments with self-modifying code, but the focus here i
Re:Where was this class for me? (Score:2, Interesting)
Foundation
Ring World
Lord Foul's Bane
Ender's Game
A Canticle for Leibowitz
The Hobbit (no, not LOTR)
The Sleeping Dragon
A lot of the others are covered in political or regular english courses (animal farm, 1984, F 451, etc), or really were just entertaining reads (Princess of Mars, Conan, Hitchhikers Guide, Xanth, etc).
Re:Unless you want students trying to fuck their m (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Where was this class for me? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've always felt that Niven alone was cool ideas, poor execution. Niven + Pournell was fantastic, and Niven + Pournell + Barnes was even better. Compare Legacy of Heorot/Beowulfs Children vs Mote in God's Eye vs Destiny Road.
Re:Where was this class for me? (Score:3, Interesting)
everyone who volunteered for combat service, and served, got to vote. No exceptions.
Actually, everyone who did "Federal Service" got to vote. The military was only one part of Federal Service.
Personally, I like the idea of making people do, say, 2 years of federal service. Assuming the 300 million people in the USA are equally distributed across ages 1-100, that means roughly 3 million people aged 18-19, and 3 million more 19-20. That's 6 million people!
Imagine a person approaching their 18th birthday. They take an aptitude test, and get assigned as a police officer. First they get (as do all of the teens, no matter what their field) 6 months military training. Boot camp, basically. Give them some purpose, some knowledge of weaponry and strategy. This means that ALL citizens will have this knowledge, therefore, if the shit hits the fan, ANY citizen can step up and fight. The number of teens in this 6 month program at any given time will be about 1.5 million, approximately the size of the current US Military.
Then they get 6 months (full time) training in law, use of weapons and other equipment, police policies, procedures, etc. They then hit the streets for the next 12 months. They are teamed with and supervised by the previous years cops. Upper ranked police ("management") are 'lifers', people who liked being cops so much they made it their career. Of course, they were carefully observed during their 2 years, and any who showed signs of abusing their power were not hired.
The same holds for any other government position. Let the 'grunt work' be handled by the kids doing their two years, and have them managed by career men/women.
It's an interesting idea.
Re:Where was this class for me? (Score:4, Interesting)
I actually took a sci-fi and fantasy class in my high school back in 1988
I've never been able to figure out why these two completely different genres are always lumped together? Fantasy fiction almost always takes plece in the past, science fiction almost always takes place in the future. Fantasy deals with magic, scifi deals with science and technology.
I don't get it, unless it's that to so many people, technology IS magic. Since it isn't really, why do literature teachers lump the two together?
Personally, I've always been a fan of science fiction, and with the exceptins of Tolkien and Pratchett have never liked fantasy. I always wanted stuff explained, both in fiction and in life. "It's magic" never worked for me.