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Dear friends -
Jim and I are working on updating the SF Institute novel reading list for next summer. Specifically, we want to add more modern works - and I would like to see more female authors represented on the list.
Requirements:
1) The works must be seminal (hardee har har, I hear you thinking) - that is, they had a major influence on the SF that followed.
2) They represent movements in the genre that are not already represented in the current list.
3) They are by authors we don't already have on the list (preferably newer authors).
We're planning to cut about five novels, so we're looking to add five modern novels. Ideas, please!
Best,
Chris
Jim and I are working on updating the SF Institute novel reading list for next summer. Specifically, we want to add more modern works - and I would like to see more female authors represented on the list.
Requirements:
1) The works must be seminal (hardee har har, I hear you thinking) - that is, they had a major influence on the SF that followed.
2) They represent movements in the genre that are not already represented in the current list.
3) They are by authors we don't already have on the list (preferably newer authors).
We're planning to cut about five novels, so we're looking to add five modern novels. Ideas, please!
Best,
Chris
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Thanks!
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Ideas, yes!
For more popularly taught texts in general lit courses, I second Atwood's Handmaid's Tale. Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time is great, too.
And then here are some suggestions for books I haven't read, but that are on my comps reading list (and would thus benefit from having more incentive to read): Joanna Russ's The Female Man, Joan Vinge's The Snow Queen, Sheri Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country, Marge Piercy's He, She, and It, or Zenna Henderson's Ingathering.
Finally, I'm so glad to see you guys including more women authors in the course. Yay!
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He would not approve McCaffrey one bit -- "It's for tourists. Visit scenic Pern!" he would say (and has). He would *really* not like Tepper, though I like _Grass_ a lot. _Gate to Women's Country_ is probably not Jim's kind of book. _Raising the Stones_ has a lot to say.
L'Engle has the advantage of being on Banned Books Week lists. I'm currently re-reading Atwood and it's kind of slow. I also find Hopkinson difficult to read, though she made the Hugo ballot. Marge Piercy's book mentioned above is another of my favorites, and pretty obscure. Maybe more later -- you probably hae a few weeks for this.
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* Brian W Aldiss, Non-Stop
* Isaac Asimov, Foundation
* Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination
* Greg Bear, Eon
* Octavia E Butler, Wild Seed
* Arthur C Clarke, Childhoods End
* Thomas M Disch, Camp Concentration
* Philip K Dick, The Man in the High Castle
* William Gibson, Neuromancer
* M John Harrison, Light
* Frank Herbert, Dune
* Robert A Heinlein, Have Spacesuit - Will Travel
* Ursula K Le Guin, The Dispossessed
* Barry Malzberg, Beyond Apollo
* Ian McDonald, River of Gods
* Frederik Pohl, Man Plus
* Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars
* Joanna Russ, The Female Man
* Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
* Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men
* Bruce Sterling, Distraction
* Theodore Sturgeon, More than Human
* Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep
* H G Wells, The War of the Worlds
* Kate Wilhelm, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
* Gene Wolfe, The Fifth Head of Cerberus
The ones that nearly made the cut were Kress, Beggars in Spain; Slonczewski, A Door Into Ocean; Haldeman, The Forever War; Blish, A Case of Conscience.
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For a short list to consider, view the James Tiptree Jr. award winners here. McHugh's China Mountain Zhang, Griffith's Ammonite, and Russell's The Sparrow are all on the list and are worthy contenders. Ironically, Tiptree herself mostly wrote at the shorter length and so unless you want to teach a book of short stories, her work might not be relevant for inclusion on your list.
I personally really like Russ's The Female Man and find it hilarious. However, I've taught it; male students (let's face it, the majority in SF classes) really, really hate it, and all students, male and female, find it dated and irrelevant, and they don't understand why Russ seems so angry. Still, in terms of impact on the genre, this has it in spades.
I am a huge Sheri S. Tepper fan, and practically any book by her is worthy of inclusion, particularly Grass, Raising the Stones, and Sideshow (which comprise her Marjorie Westriding series, though they can be read alone of course). Each of these brings up a million things to talk about with students. I don't recommend teaching her Gate to Women's Country; it's the weakest of her books, the most strident, the least subtext-y. Another good choice would be The Fresco; this is the book where fundamentalist men are impregnated by aliens, because the aliens take them at their word that "all life is sacred" and assume that their fetuses will not be aborted. Her Beauty is the best book to use if you want to focus on ecofeminism.
Joan Vinge's Snow Queen is another favorite; it has a great story, and its unfolding is riveting. This novel won a Hugo and was nominated for a Nebula.
Finally, Pamela Sargent's The Shore of Women might be another excellent choice.
Good luck! I have no idea which of these are still in print.
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On the other hand, it might be useful to have some SF that non-specialists teach in literature courses as part of the institute. It would be interesting to discuss what elements of SF those books use, what makes them more accessible to a general audience (both teachers and students), and how teaching them is different (or not different).
I think this would be valuable because it will provide a clear focus on pedagogy (and the institute is supposed to be about teaching SF, yes?) and will help address the issue of . . . what shall I call it? . . . SF separatism/elitism/ghettoization. In other words, it will help make connections between reading and teaching SF and reading and teaching literature more broadly and could provide an alternative to the "SF is superspecial" attitude that creeps in otherwise.
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But, well, we already know that SF is super-special *g*
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What movement-related context would you suggest we teach with The Snow Queen and The Shore of Women?
Thanks muchly!
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For SHORE OF WOMEN, it's a kind of lesbian separatist ironic "utopia" thing that ends up valorizing heterosexual love; lesbian utopia is a whole subgenre of SF (check out the Women's Press SF line for other titles; I saw Elgin mentioned, and she's on their backlist). SHORE is a kind of implicit comment on the genre.
For SNOW QUEEN, the altered people (the sibyls) and their connection to computers make it all about posthumanism; and the connection between nature and culture (and its relationship not only to the Queen regimes, but Tiamat's tenuous link to the outside world) can be made much of as well.
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Some other possibilities:
Slonczewski's A Door into Ocean
Elgin's Native Tongue
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They've each written several books, although the books I thought of when I first read the question were Doomsday Book and/or To Say Nothing of the Dog for Willis, and Cyteen, Downbelow Station and Rimrunners for Cherryh.
(and just for the record, I'm not too crazy about the feminist SF I've come across so far--Atwood and Russ weren't terribly subtle about their message)
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Marion Zimmer Bradley? (Not Mists of Avalon, though -- that would take over the slot of any three books, sizewise.)
I have to say, it may not be possible to do a focus on modern female SF writers without a nod to Ms. McCaffrey.
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Bujold and Bradley may be worth a look, but I would also suggest Andre Norton.
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I like Charlie Stross a lot. The one on this year's Hugo ballot was excellent.
The Bujold I like best is actually a theological fantasy -- Paladin of Souls. The one I like next best is Memory -- and it is so far into the Vorkosigan universe I'm not sure it would have the resonance and depth that the series imparts to this particular volume. Good book, but I don't know anyone who has read it as a stand-alone.
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One other thing -- _Door into Ocean_ is incredibly dense as well as very feminist. I would treat it as two books for just that reason. [Um. I found _Perdido Street Sation_ unreadable. Same for _American Gods_. Actually, I have only managed to get through one Gaiman book. He just bores the life out of me.]
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If it helps, I wrote down some ideas about the book when I read it a few months ago. It's part summary, part reflection on how I would use this book in a course I was teaching at the time. I would still like to assign this book in one of my courses, actually.
I think it would be a good addition to the institute's reading list because 1) it's an award-winning novel, 2) it deals with several important issues at once and does a fairly good job of exploring connections between those different issues, and 3) it is, I think, quite teachable, both in a SF-oriented classroom and a more broadly-oriented classroom.