Course Description
Summary
For the last hundred years or so, speculative fiction has been a way for writers to imagine the future, but also, implicitly or explicitly, to think about the present. We’ll read genre, mainstream, and hard-to-classify works from the 1920s to the 2010s, with particular attention to the ways in which speculative fiction uses language to create a world, and the ways in which its created worlds cast light on gender, race, politics, and other human notions. We’ll read stories and novels by Evgeny Zamyatin, H.P. Lovecraft, Stanislaw Lem, Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. LeGuin, Russell Hoban, Octavia Butler, Kazuo Ishiguro, Cixin Liu, Yoss, and others. There will be both critical and creative writing assignments.
