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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. '"
You might consider that not only does the world around us inform the fiction that is written (consider Heinlein's social and political commentary in Starship Troopers) but that also Science Fiction informs our own world (see how innovation is sparked by what SciFi has given us. Also, the genres can be used to teach us about the past (Piers Anthony's Steppe) or give us a glimpse into the far future (Niven's Ringworld). There is quite a lot of SciFi in our daily lives, but our world is certainly present in our SciFi.
I want to know where this class was $Big_Num years ago. I would have jumped at the chance to participate in such a class.
it is better to light a flame thrower than curse the darkness. -Terry Pratchett Men at Arms
My reading is (obviously) slanted toward sci-fi over fantasy but here's some more names to consider (in no order): Stanislaw Lem, Assimov, Wells, Philip K. Dick, Orwell, Mary Shelley, H. P. Lovecraft, William Gibson, Charles Stross, Heinlein, Vonnegut, Lois Lowry, Madeleine L'Engle, Larry Niven, Sturgeon, Huxley, Herbert, Stephenson, Douglas Adams, Rand, Anthony Burgess, Philip Jose Farmer, Robert Silverberg, Harry Harrison, Frederick Pohl, Harlan Ellison, Jack Williamson, E.E. Smith and Crichton. While you might feel some of them belong elsewhere (Shelley, Vonnegut, Rand, Orwell) they're still sci-fi/fantasy.
Um, what were you planning to have them do? What amount of reading per week are you aiming at? 20-30 pages? I realize a lot of the authors (Jordan especially) may be too much to ask.
My work here is dung.
Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is a favorite classic. Science fiction, but easy to read for anyone.
I think the books really transcend into life in the 21st century. Plus there's a plethora of movie versions you could show your class.
Think of the children! PLEASE!
No offense .. but it sounds like this course is going to be just like most English courses..
That is.. take an enjoyable experience (i.e. reading a good book) and turn it into a complete chore by over-analysing everything to the point that students shun reading forever.
Now.. maybe some high school students would enjoy comparing their favorite sci-fi series to the cold war.. or writing a 10 page essay on what the author _REALLY_ meant when he said "John walked briskly across the street".. but I suspect most won't.
That said.. if this is your intention though.. 1984 is a must. You can (and people have) turn just about any paragraph in that book into a masters thesis.
Cyberpunk (Gibson, Stross et al)
Classic old school sci-fi (Clarke, Heinlein etc)
Modern Space opera (Ian M Banks)
High Fantasy (Tolkein et al
Schlock Fantasy (Dragonlance, Drizzt)
Robert Heinlein!
Note: I'll write only about the books I've read, other folks might have other points of view.
Heinlein might have had a weird way of looking at things but he has great stories as an introduction to the scifi genre - light(ish) reading with plenty of topics to discuss.
Take two of his works that I recommend to folks, Starship Troopers and Farmer in the Sky. Both are "juvenile" books - sex and misogyny are themes in Heinlein's later works - but deal with life in space in a very realistic way. They're wildly speculative yet, just barely, they're plausible enough to make sense.
If you're looking for short stories, there's The Man Who Sold The Moon - short stories populated with really far-fetched ideas yet it's a really fun read.
I'm sure other people will suggest other things but I strongly suggest you take a look at Heinlein for the kids, after all he wrote a bunch of stories for them that are easy reads and are, as far as I can remember, kid-safe.
I'm resisting recommending more authors - as I'm sure this thread will be full of them - but Heinlein's earlier works, from what I recall, are nice examples of scifi aimed towards younger audiences.
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One thing that might generate extra interest is stuff that has been adapted into a movie. Daphne du Maurier's "The Birds" comes to mind, but I'm pretty antiquated.
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I'd add some H. G. Wells and John W. Campbell - classics before Asimov (although Campbell's personal views are somewhat controversial now). And of course Asimov was mentioned by some people above me already.
Also, there are genres that fall within sci-fi and fantasy, like alternate history. Some good sources for short stories, too, are the Asimov's, Analog and SF&F literary magazines, and also short story digests published on a regular basis that include some big names writing short stories for the more literary public.
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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.
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius
All joking aside, I can't see why this class is necessary. Science Fiction and Fantasy are meant to be enjoyed. If you force children who aren't interested, they still won't like it. If it's an elective, then you'll get kids who have probably already read all of the books that might be offered, so they won't fully enjoy it either. Unless it worked around not that well known literature and focused more on discussions and less on bulk reading/essays, it might have some merit.
For that matter, a good 1/3 of my books read in plain ol' Lit were sci-fi/fantasy. Would that class be changed to general lit? Will there be no other specialized lit classes? Will they cut general lit and change it into specialized lit, so that no one has to leave the genre they like? I prefer the generalized approached to reading, otherwise you are in danger of never leaving your comfort zone.
"Ender's Game." "Lord of the Rings." Hell, "Chronicles of Narnia." "Starship Troopers." "The Demolished Man." "Ringworld." No reason not to sprinkle some legitimately entertaining reads into the mix, and since the above-mentioned books all have fairly rich themes to discuss, you won't compromise academic value to get something that might hook them.
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"
One of the best first Sifi books is The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury.
The stories are short and insightful and will make for great discussions in this age group. Although it was written in the early 50's the stories are (from what I remember) still very relevant with great social commentary.
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.
but while you're teaching high school students science fiction, kids in other high schools are learning actual science
In other high schools, kids are learning about mutual exclusivity.
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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.
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Also, the following should be included as well:
Drakon, by S.M. Stirling
Watermind, by M.M. Buckner
Improbable, by Adam Fawer (not listed as sci-fi, but definitely in the modern genre)
and, of course, A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
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.
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Depends though. I was in a number of literature classes and book clubs in high school and a lot of the books that have made the most impact weren't the "classic" books that everyone thinks about, but rather the odd book that one or two students really liked so the entire class read it. For example, even though my teacher had never read an Ayn Rand book, one of the students had and recommended it, and it really challenged and expanded my view of the world. It also helps reduce certain biases by teachers in what types of books you read (and its pretty easy with fantasy/sci-fi for a teacher to project their own personal beliefs via the types of books).
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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.
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Avoid Heinlein. He's only got like 3 good books anyway (Starship Troopers, Moon is a Harsh Mistress [best sci fi book ever], and half each of Stranger and Cat), and subjecting anyone to that convoluted, Oedipus-driven Lazarus Long shit at an early age is either going to turn them off the genre, or make them try to mount their mothers.
Heinlein, _Friday_. Because the parents are going to complain anyway, so you might as well give them a reason. Bonus points for the 1983 cover.
"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.
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
You might as well have asked people to name their favorite fantasy or sci-fi authors; you're going to get zillions of lists of recommendations without much guidance on what to pick and why.
IMHO, you need to look at that course description and ask questions like "Can you suggest some high quality fantasy or sci-fi works that have as their core theme "the relationship of humans with their environment" or "the nature of intelligence" or whatever.
Two recommendations I'd make:
1. Don't be afraid to go old (H.G. Wells _The Time Machine_, for instance, attempts to make some provocative claims about what happens to an increasingly technological society -- remarkable given when it was written).
2. Steer away from huge works. LOTR is my favorite fantasy book; but books like that are too big. They prevent you from reading too much other stuff because of time constraints.
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.
Nerds belong in a sci-fi/fantasy lit class. but on a more serious note, The Last Question by Isaac Asimov should definitely be on the list.
Then somebody will bring up Card himself, and then you'll never get the kids to stop yelling at each other.
A classic SF writer that is often forgotten is Fredric Brown. Although his SF stories are often short (usually less that 1000 words) they are totally amazing and stand the test of time very well. One of his more famous short stories, "Arena" was used as the basis of a Star Trek episode by the same name.
I personally liked his several short stories that dealt with time travel and the many ways that people tried to deal with them. My favorite story, "The End", deals with what would really happen if someone could make time run backwards.
The real brilliance of his writing is that he could make you think without delving into political commentary and do it in just a few words. His stories were descriptive enough that you could picture the worlds he described, but not so descriptive that they limited the story to a particular time or place. Stories written in 1954 could have easily been written in 1994. In other words, truly timeless science fiction, something that is very, very difficult to do.
I will get off my soap box now, with a quote from Fredric Brown.
"The last man on earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door..."
Great civilizations have lived and died on false theories. Don't mess up mine with a few facts.
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/
Each is between 30 mins and an hour or so, reading, mostly non-dramaticized.
I'm here to criticize. The purpose of Fantasy, and to a lesser extent Science Fiction, is not primarily escapism. Rather, it is to create an understanding of the human condition by using speculation or other plot devices. The first thing that comes to mind are those black white / white black dudes on Star Trek - which you should probably show your class as an example of what science fiction is actually about. I think you also need to define for your class what is speculative fiction, what is hard science fiction, and what is fantasy with spaceships and fantasy with unicorns.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
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
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Re: What Belongs In a High School Sci-Fi/Fantasy Lit Class?
Microsoft total cost of ownership studies. ;)
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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?).
The really great SF novels incorporate just as much character development and moral dilema as any contemporary fiction. Orson Scott Card for example frequently gives his protagonists (and antagonists occasionally) moral issues to deal with in futuristic settings. One of the things i love most about the Ender series is the way he uses relativistic space travel to alter the relationships over decades long correspondence. See Ender in Exile -- in the last few chapters -- for an example of this.
Also since the parent mentioned 1984, it's worth noting how much Orwell focused on the dystopia's effect on Smith's psyche. Not to say the environment isn't significant, but you can't discount the human element in a good book, no matter the genre.
Other authors i would add to the list to cover, Niel Gaiman (Stardust is priceless, though there is an explicit scene), C.S. Lewis (Perelandra is difficult diction, but really creative), Marlowe (Faustus could be considered an early Fantasy), Dan Simmons (if adult language/graphic content are admissible), Bram Stoker, and if you want a fantasy piece that comments on the time period, Spenser's Faerie Queene is exactly that.
Other authors i haven't personally read but have been recommended are Feist, Salvator, Saberhagen, and maybe Thousand and One Nights, but that's a stretch.
But just to make sure everyone understands it will be politicized the last sentence of the /. summary is the tell:
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.
Best regards.
Well, there are some people who would have an opinion on the authors but that is totally unfair for those who don't. So in the interest of fairness, I gave some people something to rant about so they have something to post.
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Had to reply to this. I agree with your assessment that Heinlein's novels are not the greatest (Although I thought "Time Enough for Love" had some interesting ideas), and I was a hardcore Heinlein fanboi for a while. But his short stories are amazing. "By His Bootstraps" is one of the coolest time travel stories ever. "The Man Who Sold the Moon" is brilliant. And "Life-line" and "Let There Be Light," his first two published stories, are really good descriptions of the conflict between transformative technologies and entrenched interests, which have arguably more relevance today than when they were first written (c.f. the automobile or music industries). Because the OP asked for ideas of short stories as well as novels, and you can't include novels by everyone, by all means, feature one or two of Heinlein's short stories. Because any sci-fi/fantasy class that "avoid[s] Heinlein" is like a Classical Music class that omits Beethoven.
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Mr. Pratchett's work is brilliant, insightful, and often as funny as Monty Python. Racism, war, discrimination, child-raising, gangs, drug addiction, and all the ills of the modern age are covered in ways that both entertain and educate.
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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.
I would suggest Terry Goodkind's First Book, Wizards First Rule, even though it is extremely lengthy because it is the beginning to what I believe to be the best Fantasy series ever to be written. Also, Tad Williams' Otherland is exceptionally wonderful. Something you maybe able to do for the longer books is assign them at the beginning of the semester and have an extra-credit test at the end of the semester over the book.
Well it's impossible to ask for recommendations without those recommendations being influenced by emotions. But one way to at least mitigate that is to structure it around themes, since the description specifically states that the class will involve various social issues. For example:
:)
Read Robert Heinlein's "Starship Troopers," Joe Haldeman's "The Forever War," and John Scalzi's "Old Man's War." Then discuss what they think each author thought about war and its consequences and how that reflected or disagreed with society's views at the time.
Read James Alan Gardner's "Commitment Hour," Lois McMaster Bujold's "A Civil Campaign," and David Brin's "Glory Season" and discuss gender roles and how science fiction can be used to explore them.
Read Walter M. Miller, Jr's "A Canticle for Leibowitz," Roger Zelazny's "Lord of Light," and Lois McMaster Bujold's "Curse of Chalion" and discuss the role of religion in SF/Fantasy.
Read William Gibson's "Neuromancer," Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash," and Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End" and discuss how our view of the future in general and computers in particular has changed over the past few decades, as well as the differences and similarities between "serious" prediction of the future and satirical commentary on the present.
Alternately one could read early and late books for each of Heinlein, James P. Hogan, Hubbard, Orson Scott Card and Michael Crichton and discuss the varying degrees to which (nominally) decent SF authors go loopy in their later years
I'm sure there're lots more ideas along those lines.
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