Teaching with The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction


I wrote a bit about The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction back when it first came out, and then a few weeks later I was tasked with having to create a syllabus for a "Special Topics" course in our Women's Studies program that I called Gender & Science Fiction. I knew I wanted to start the course with a variety of short stories to give the students some experience in reading SF before we plunged into novels, but I couldn't find an anthology that was eclectic enough for my needs. Then I remembered The Wesleyan Anthology, and took a look at its table of contents to see how well it would fit. Bingo, I had one of my textbooks.

The students will present their final papers on Friday, and I wanted to take a moment here to say that the anthology actually worked even better than I thought it would, and try to explain some of the reasons I think that is so.


What I didn't realize from a quick glance at the table of contents was how well the stories would fit with each other. As I said in my original post about the book, I was familiar with 95% of these stories before the book arrived on my doorstep. Some of those stories, though, I hadn't reread in over a decade -- in a few cases, two decades -- and so until I was selecting which ones to teach, I didn't have a strong sense of how well the anthology was edited.

From a teacher's point of view, the book is a treasure trove, because for each story in it there are other stories that make for productive comparisons. Additionally, most of the stories are very accessible to readers who don't have a lot of experience with SF. I can demonstrate this by showing some of the ways I put the stories together.

Here are the stories I used in the order I assigned them (if you want to see the full syllabus in all its deeply imperfect glory, it's here):
Pat Cadigan, "Pretty Boy Crossover" (paired with Edmond Hamilton's "The War of the Sexes")
Robert Heinlein, "'All You Zombies--'"
Kate Wilhelm, "Forever Yours, Anna"
Alfred Bester, "Fondly Fahrenheit"
Greg Egan, "Closer"
Philip K. Dick, "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale"
Pamela Zoline, "The Heat Death of the Universe"
Fritz Leiber, "Coming Attraction"
Samuel R. Delany, "Aye, and Gomorrah"
Frederik Pohl, "Day Million"
Robert Silverberg, "Passengers"
Leslie F. Stone, "The Conquest of Gola"
Stanley G. Weinbaum, "A Martian Odyssey"
Joanna Russ, "When It Changed"
James Patrick Kelly, "Think Like a Dinosaur" (paired with Godwin's "The Cold Equations")
Carol Emshwiller, "Abominable"
John Kessel, "Invaders"
There's no way to really summarize all of the ways those stories work together, but it goes beyond the obvious (e.g., time travel with the Heinlein and Wilhelm stories) to the rich resonances between the Egan, Leiber, Delany, Pohl, and Silverberg stories, to the way the Stone story really shows some of the limitations of the Weinbaum (which is, yes, a classic beloved of people who first read it when it came out in 1934, but was for us the most tedious story we read all term; preparing for the class, I suddenly remembered why I'd never finished reading it before in all the times I tried).

"Pretty Boy Crossover" proved to be a great starting point. It's an evocative and affecting story, very efficiently written, but none of its speculations or extrapolations are so bizarre as to give a first-time science fiction reader a headache. The story has held up very well over the years, despite significant developments in the sorts of technology at the heart of the tale, and I found it even more impressive when I read it this time than when I last read it eight or nine years ago. It's a story that's long been close to my heart, because I first encountered it in Dozois's Fourth back when I was a young SF reader. It seems to me about as perfect as a short story can be.

Though the editors of the anthology did not include "The Cold Equations" and some of them thought its connection to "Think Like a Dinosaur" should be de-emphasized, the two stories fit together perfectly for our purposes, especially because they allowed us to talk a bit about how readers interpret themes and moral positions from texts -- everyone in the class thought "The Cold Equations" was ghastly in a different way from "Think Like a Dinosaur", but they struggled to explain exactly why. (Though one student did say "Think Like a Dino" had "scarred me for life," which we told Jim when he beamed into our class via Skype. Jim, being the nicest man on Earth, did not do what I would have done, which would be to smile broadly, cackle, and say, "I'm so glad!" Instead, he apologized to her and said he hoped she was okay now. This is why Jim has friends and devoted followers, and why I have ... well, we don't need to go into that now ... but the food here at the asylum isn't as bad as I was led to believe...) The class had what I thought was a great conversation about how we discern (or think we discern) an author's intention within a story -- why did it seem to them, I asked, that "The Cold Equations" was written from a desire to come up with a situation in which it would be "acceptable" to kill an innocent young woman while they intuited somewhat more interesting and less misogynistic motives to "Think Like a Dinosaur". From the first moments we started talking about the stories, everybody seemed  to have that same sense of them, and it was interesting to probe where such a sense came from, especially because "The Cold Equations" is still able to incite lots of controversy.

The students read "Abominable" (one of Carol Emshwiller's most delightful stories, which is saying something) while I was in NYC interviewing the author, which was fun (both the interview and having students read her story). And then I used Kessel's "Invaders" on the final day of class before exams week because though it doesn't have anything specifically about gender in it, it is a fine story for opening up a conversation about science fiction, escapism, seriousness, and morality. I didn't want to end the class with us just feeling like we'd had a good exploration of gender and/or science fiction; instead, I wanted us to think about some things I tend to think about obsessively: why do we read anything in the first place? What relationship do our imaginary worlds have to our real worlds? "Invaders" is one of the best stories to help spark a conversation about such topics.

The stories in The Wesleyan Anthology proved to be an excellent entryway into the rest of the term -- we continued then with a bunch of Tiptree stories, mostly from Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, which proved somewhat less effective than I had hoped, because I had underestimated the effect of reading a bunch of Tiptree stories at once on young and idealistic undergraduates. "Her life was interesting to learn about," one of them told me, "but these stories are the most depressing things I've ever read." After that came Delany's Babel-17, which is plenty of fun, and not generally depressing, so the students liked me again.

The Wesleyan Anthology's greatest weakness, as discussed previously, is its three haphazard selections from after 1995; I fixed this problem by also assigning David Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer's Year's Best SF 14, a good book for our purposes because its stories are mostly core science fiction and there are quite a few that do something interesting with gender. Because of snow days and sick days, I had to cut out more of these stories than I would have had we had the amount of time I originally planned on, but it was a useful book nonetheless.

I'll talk about the novels we read in a different post, as well as the way the students used the novels they had some free choice with. (I want to chronicle what I can from this class right now because it's unlikely that I'll get to teach it or another like it again in the near future -- Special Topics in Women's Studies only runs in the spring of odd-numbered years, it's likely they'll want another topic next time, and I'm not going to be able to afford to keep working as a adjunct teacher much longer, at least if I want to, you know, ever buy food.)

If teachers are wondering how well The Wesleyan Anthology works in a real classroom, I'm happy to say it's a winner. It includes far more material than we were able to use, but not so much material that it is overwhelming or feels like a huge waste of paper. The stories are well balanced, full of resonances and echoes among each other, and there are enough different types of stories that the anthology gives a teacher quite a lot of possibilities for ideas, styles, and themes to explore.

Popular posts from this blog

"Stone Animals" by Kelly Link

If Kelly Link isn't the best short story writer in the U.S., then she's the equal of whoever is. I first came to this conclusion a couple of years ago when I read her story "Lull" in Conjunctions: 39 , and I am absolutely certain of it now that I have read "Stone Animals" in Conjunctions: 43 . (Of course, I've also read her collection Stranger Things Happen , but, much as I admire it, nothing in that book is as breathtaking as the stories she has written since it appeared, particularly the two Conjunctions stories.) "Stone Animals" both employs and parodies the basic elements of suburban psychological realism, the sort of scaffolding John Cheever and so many other writers hung their words and laundry on: a family buying a house and moving into it, a father commuting to a desultory job in the city, a pregnant wife who is uncertain about her marriage, suspicions and allegations of adultery, existentially anxious children, a controlling b...
Read more

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

If you expect Never Let Me Go to be about cloning, you will be disappointed. If you expect to be able to read it as a logical science fiction novel, one that extrapolates an alternate world that makes sense, you will find much to grumble about. You will not be satisfied. You will be annoyed, even bored. You will have missed the point. Cloning is a MacGuffin that Kazuo Ishiguro uses to create symbolic situations and characters that coalesce in a powerful vision of life. The symbolism doesn't quite reach the level of allegory, because it's difficult to assign definite meanings to each scene and person, but nonetheless it quickly becomes difficult not to think about certain themes: mortality, love, fate, memory, art, nature. Each paragraph either illustrates or expands one of these themes. In the first half of the book, the ideas the novel personifies do not gain a lot of emotion, but by the second half of the book the characters have become familiar, their personalitie...
Read more

"Loot" by Nadine Gordimer

I've intended to write about Nadine Gordimer's very short story "Loot" for years, ever since I first read it in The New Yorker , and for some reason I actually thought I had written a post here about it.  I recommended the story to a friend a few days ago and intended to include a link to my post about the story when, after a bit of searching, I realized I'd never written the post.  Now I will fix that mistake. From the first sentence, "Loot" is a story about time and history, about legends and imagination.  "Once upon our time," it tells us, there was a Great Event -- the greatest earthquake every recorded, the greatest of all measured "apocalyptic warnings".  Not only is it a Great Event (indeed, the Greatest of such events), but it is ours: we possess it. The second paragraph details the effects of this greatest event of ours.  Most giant earthquakes at sea produce floods and tsunamis, but not ours -- our special earthquake d...
Read more

The Penny Poet of Portsmouth by Katherine Towler

     Dawn again, and I switch off the light. On the table a tattered moth shrugs its wings.      I agree. Nothing is ever quite what we expect it to be. —Robert Dunn Katherine Towler's deeply affecting and thoughtful portrait of Robert Dunn is subtitled "A Memoir of Place, Solitude, and Friendship". It's an accurate label, but one of the things that makes the book such a rewarding reading experience is that it's a memoir of struggles with place, solitude, and friendship — struggles that do not lead to a simple Hallmark card conclusion, but rather something far more complex. This is a story that could have been told superficially, sentimentally, and with cheap "messages" strewn like sugarcubes through its pages. Instead, it is a book that honors mysteries. You are probably not familiar with the poetry of Robert Dunn , nor even his name, unless you happen to live or have lived in or around Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Even then, you may not ...
Read more

Reflections on Samuel Delany's Dark Reflections

At the Los Angeles Review of Books , I have a new essay about Samuel R. Delany's 2007 novel Dark Reflections , which is about to be released in a new and slightly revised edition by Dover Books . Here's a taste: In many ways,  Dark Reflections  is a narrative companion to Delany’s 2006 collection of essays, letters, and interviews,  About Writing . In the introduction to that book, Delany says that its varied texts share common ideas, primary among them ideas about the art of writing fiction, the structure of the writer’s socio-aesthetic world both in the present and past, and “the way literary reputations grow — and how, today, they don’t grow.” The book is mainly, though not exclusively, aimed at aspiring writers. It provides some advice on craft, but it circles back most insistently to questions of value, and especially to questions of the difference between  good writing  and  talented writing  — and what it means, practically and materially, ...
Read more

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell's debut novel What Belongs to You  is one of the most celebrated and successful gay novels of 2016. Its success seems to me both odd and gratifying. It is a book that garnered the attention of the literati, and not just the gay literati, though it certainly has that (Edmund White blessed it with a blurb). It received praiseful notice from nearly all the major literary institutions in the U.S. (and elsewhere). It is a remarkable novel, but were I a literary agent or publisher, much of what makes the novel remarkable would have caused me to assume it would not sell very well and would find, at best, a niche audience. (This is perhaps reason #28,302 that it's good I'm neither a publisher nor an agent!) I don't know the sales figures for What Belongs to You , but it hit the LA Times  bestseller list for a couple weeks, got tremendous review coverage, and often seemed to be among the books of the moment — I traveled a lot during 2016, and nearly everyw...
Read more

The Snowtown Murders

The Snowtown Murders  (aka Snowtown ) inevitably draws comparisons to another brutal and disturbing Australian crime movie, Animal Kingdom , with which it shares some general plot elements and stylistic moves (both films were shot by Adam Arkapaw ). But where  Animal Kingdom  shows one young man's struggle to stay innocent in a family of thieves and murderers, Snowtown  depicts the power of a small-time messiah to employ hatred as an excuse for torture and murder. Both films focus their narrative on a quiet (eventually traumatized) adolescent surrounded by monsters, but Animal Kingdom,  for all its virtues, is primarily a drama of demons and angels fighting for a soul, whereas Snowtown  is less allegorical, less schematic, and more deeply disturbing. (A more meaningful comparison than with Animal Kingdom  would be with  Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer .) Though in some ways Snowtown  is the story of how Jamie Vlassakis goes fro...
Read more