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What Belongs In a High School Sci-Fi/Fantasy Lit Class?
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. '"
Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is a favorite classic. Science fiction, but easy to read for anyone.
We spanned HG Wells (Time Machine) through Larry Niven (Ring World). A lot of it depends on how the material is presented. My prof at the time was a repressed poet, and went into the deep meaningful relationships in Heinlein's "Double Star" and swore that the author was seeing a shrink while writing the book. We also went through the original Foundation trilogy where the prof kept pointing out how the administrators of the planet were going through a feminization and had an oral fixation. During the discussion of "Dune" (and again later in "Ring World") there was pointing out of the male fear of falling into a hole - especially a hole with teeth.
Personally, I would look at the older scifi (golden age, 30s-50s) for technology that they proposed and see how long it took to actually implement. Then look at technology mentioned in contemporary scifi and see how close we are to getting there.
jerry
"Software is the difference between hardware and reality"
I can tell you that you should explore the roots of speculative fiction and what it means. For example, here are the novels that we read in my class(which was admittedly a college-level course).
Pilgrim's Progress (John Bunyan)
The Invisible Man (Wells)
The Hobbit (Tolkien) - Whatever you do, don't try to do so thoroughly. The Hobbit alone is a lot of material.
The Neverending Story (Michael Ende) - HIGHLY recommend this one.
Divine Right's Trip (Gurney Norman) - This was an excellent book that I still reference today, but is probably the first one on this list that I'd drop.
Neuromancer (Gibson)
We also covered numerous short stories. A few of the more memorable ones:
The Cold Equations (Tom Godwin) - Excellent, if dated. there's a film of it, as well, but it added a lot of side material.
The Celestial Railroad (Hawthorne) - Highly recommended after Pilgrim's Progress.
The Last Question (Asimov) - Required reading.
Heinlein is also an excellent choice, though we didn't cover it in my class.
- Free tabletop fantasy gaming! Grey Lotus
Then somebody will bring up Card himself, and then you'll never get the kids to stop yelling at each other.
Georgia Tech has been offering a ridiculously popular Science Fiction literature class since the 70s. You might use it's curriculum as a guide. http://lcc.gatech.edu/~brobertson3/texts/sf.pdf
Heck, if you really want to shock the parents with Heinlein, try "Job: A Comedy of Justice". My wife and I were reading it with each other through part of the labor of our second child. I think the monitoring nurse was either religious or a bit fundamentalist - at any rate she was awfully quiet, moreso than other nurses, or even she was before we began reading.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I realize this may not occur to anyone as a shoe in for such a course, but I took a class in my sophomore year of college in which we covered Max Brook's World War Z. Almost every other text used in the class was met with mixed enthusiasm (we covered Dune, Neuromancer, Caves of Steel, Electric Sheep, Starship Troopers, etc.) but everyone seemed to love Brooks' work and discussion went fantastically. Any student vaguely familiar with Bush-era political controversy will gain a huge appreciation of how effectively satire can be incorporated in works of science fiction. And everyone loves zombies right now, so it's win-win.
Where Le Guin is concerned... If you dare to subject high school kids to The Left Hand of Darkness, good luck reviving them afterward. I know little about Earthsea, but from what I've heard secondhand, that may be a more viable option for your purposes. If including a female author is what you're looking to do, then go for Mary Shelley, the woman who invented the science fiction novel.
Someone has probably already said it, but show people how wonderful the mind of Tolkien was by giving them The Hobbit, not the trilogy. The Hobbit is the book that made me love to read. As far as I'm concerned, it offers much more memorable people and places in a much tidier package than the drawn-out, song/poem-laden trilogy. One advantage to using LotR, however, would be if you were looking to get into the function of allegory.
For short stories, a nice place to start might be Neil Gaiman's collection Fragile Things.
Dune is awfully hard not to recommend. One of my favorite novels, it wasn't until I read it with others that I started to notice uncanny resemblances to certain modern-day desert conflicts.
And if you get a chance, be sure to fuck their minds up with some Phillip K. Dick and make them laugh with the first installment of Hitchhiker's Guide.
Actually, the protagonist of the book (Juan Rico) was Filipino, as noted at the very end where he mentions they speak Tagalog at home.
(Score: -1, Pedantic)