Because several people asked (follow-up to Q&A 16)

[truepenny]

Okay, so here's the thing. Revenge tragedy is a small genre. Sure, there are a few plays I left out (Bussy d'Ambois, The Second Maiden's Tragedy), but not very many, and you're not missing a lot. Sure, they're interesting, even if not very good (personal opinion), but reading them won't dramatically deepen or widen your understanding of the genre.

Any ONE of the Cerberus heads of twentieth-century fantasy, science fiction, and horror, on the other hand, is a huge genre, with tremendous variation, and the three in combination--you couldn't do it justice in a semester, even on the most superficial level.

So I'm going to throw some things out there, things I'd teach together: modules, let's say. And because the field isn't broad enough already, I'm going to allow nineteenth century texts as well. These lists aren't exhaustive by any stretch of the imagination. They're what I can think of off the top of my head.

Note also, please, that saying I'd like to teach a text is not the same thing as saying I like the text.

So.

Man-Made Men
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein
H. G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau
Isaac Asimov, I, Robot
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
James Cameron, The Terminator
one of the Data/Lore episodes of Star Trek: the Next Generation
James Tiptree, Jr., "The Girl Who Was Plugged In"

Vampires
Bram Stoker, Dracula
Suzy McKee Charnas, The Vampire Tapestry
Barbara Hambly, Those Who Hunt the Night and Traveling with the Dead
John Marks, Fangland
Nancy A. Collins, Sunglasses After Dark
Joss Whedon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel
(other texts could be added at the student's discretion, because god knows there's a metric fuckton of vampire novels, short stories, and movies out there)

Secondary-World Fantasy
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion
Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan
Diana Wynne Jones, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland and the Dalemark Quartet
Samuel Delany's Neveryon books

Adventurers
Robert E. Howard (Conan)
Fritz Leiber (Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser)
C. L. Moore (Jirel) (read with Female, an unspeakably ghastly 1933 film that demonstrates exactly what Moore is subverting with Jirel)
Roger Zelazny, Nine Princes in Amber

Weird Tales
M. R. James, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
H. P. Lovecraft, "At the Mountains of Madness," "The Colour out of Space," "Pickman's Model," "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath"
Lord Dunsany--something (I haven't read as much Dunsany as I should, so I'd have to do my own homework first)
a selection from Austin Tappan Wright's Islandia
ditto Mervyn Peake and Gormenghast
short stories by Roald Dahl and John Collier and Robert Aickman and Agatha Christie and a number of other people whose names are currently escaping me
Fritz Leiber, "Space-time for Springers"
the story about coat hangers and bicycles, of which I can never remember EITHER the author OR the title--argh! Avram Davidson, "Or All the Sea With Oysters"
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
Ira Levin, Rosemary's Baby
Stephen King, The Dead Zone
Peter Straub, Koko, Mystery, The Throat
Kathe Koja, The Cypher
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Illustrated Man
John Crowley, Little, Big
Neil Gaiman et al., Sandman
Swamp Thing (start with Wrightson and Wein in order to set up Moore)

Utopia/Dystopia
Thomas More, Utopia
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
Franz Kafka, "In the Penal Colony," etc.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Yevgeny Zamyatin, We
Alan Moore et al., V for Vendetta
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

Lunar Modules
Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and his other Moon-centric stories
John M. Ford, Growing Up Weightless
(I just want to put these two together and watch Ford give Heinlein the smackdown; other Moon stories would be great; at the moment I can't think of any)

Outer Space Alien Freaks
H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds
Robert A. Heinlein, The Puppet-Masters
Ridley Scott, Alien, Aliens
Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
Alan Moore et al., Watchmen (think about it for a minute before you object)
Zenna Henderson's People stories

Contact, First or Otherwise
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness, "Vaster than Empires"
C. J. Cherryh, Foreigner, The Pride of Chanur
Nicola Griffith, Ammonite
Peter Watts, Blindsight
Elizabeth Bear, Carnival
James Tiptree, Jr., Up the Walls of the World, Houston, Houston, Do You Read?
the Joanna Russ story I've forgotten the title of--"When It All Changed"?Joanna Russ, "When It Changed"

Mind like a steel wossname, people, and I think I'd better go to bed.

ETA: Shameful lack of secondary reading, yes. I am not au courant with the field, and none of the stuff I have read is worth the paper it's printed on. Okay, except for some of the work on Dracula: there are some articles I could dig out of my filing cabinet but I'm not going to do it now.

Comments

[glinda-w.livejournal.com]

Isn't the coat hangers and bicycles story "Or all the sea with oysters" by Avram Davidson? (I *think*. Not sure. Memory like a wossname.)

The Russ story is "When It Changed" - it's in one of the Dangerous Visions books, IIRC.

[carbonel]

Technically, "seas" rather than "sea," but yes.

[strangerian.livejournal.com]

For the lunar module:
Arthur Clarke's Earthlight, as another take on the kind of thing Heinlein was doing;
John Varley's Steel Beach is also trying to take the piss out of Heinlein though it's heavy-handed and weird in its own way. The Eight Worlds stories and parts of Ophiuchi Hotline also have an established lunar colony as the setting.

Larry Niven has a number of certified Outer Space Alien Freaks, notably in Mote in God's Eye and the extended series of Known Space stories and novels, such as Ringworld and Protector.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

I believe that Steel Beach and Ophiuchi Hotline are explicitly part of the "Eight Worlds" setting. And yes, it's very much in dialogue with Heinlein (and rather a lot else, I think I cought about half of what Varley was doing there).

[comrade-cat.livejournal.com]

Coathangers & bicycles is 'Or All The Seas With Oysters,' by Avram Davidson. Yay Avram Davidson!

[lferion]

My freshman year in college I took a class called "History and Utopia" Which was fabulous and has affected my thought on several things ever since. We started with More, finished with Le Guin, and traversed Erehwon, Looking Backward, Brave New World, and a couple of other things I'm forgetting. I'd already read both 1984 and The Dispossessed before I got there, so when I read the syllabus (being a little terrified of being in college and all) it was exhilarating and frightening both to realize I could *see* where the class was going, and that I really was in the right place -- it wasn't (finally!) going to be easy, but hoo boy was the ride going to be fun.

And I was right.

utopia/dystopia

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

Rudyard Kipling, "As Easy as A.B.C." (aka "As Easy as ABC") The earliest intentionally ambiguous utopia I'm sure of.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

My scanning brain jumped ahead of my careful-reading brain, resulting in the thought: "But Frankenstein isn't a revenge tragedy!" Although it is the work that really made me understand the point of tragedy for the first time.

For utopias, I'm fond of Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time. It's notable for portraying a plausible society that people might actually want to live in.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, actually, Frankenstein IS a revenge tragedy. It's the tragedy of the creature's revenge on Victor Frankenstein. You could even argue, if you were feeling particularly perverse, that the creature is revenging the death of his bride. About the only difference, really, is that Renaissance revengers don't intentionally kill innocent bystanders.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Is a revenge tragedy just a tragedy in which revenge takes place? I had assumed it was one in which the desire to take revenge was closely related to the protagonist's tragic flaw. But this is so far from my area of specialty that I'm probably pulling this out of nowhere.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

The "tragic flaw" is a fallacy. (I will not go off at you about it, but--short version--the way it gets taught in American high schools and colleges is based on a misreading of Aristotle, and even if it wasn't a misreading, Aristotle's theories of tragedy really only work for Oedipus Rex.)

A revenge tragedy, in its strict form, is a play in which the central action is a wrongful death (which may, as in Hamlet, take place before the play begins) and an act of revenge. The revenge inevitably causes more deaths, almost always including the death of the revenger himself, and generally makes everything about five billion times worse. That's why it's a revenge tragedy.

Of course, there are a lot of revenge tragedies that don't adhere to the strict form. (The Changeling, for example, is really more of a tragedy-with-a-revenger-in-it, since the revenger is completely ineffectual.) But plays that get called revenge tragedies are generally plays that are in dialogue with (to use the fancy lit crit jargon) the question of revenge.

[clhollandwriter]

I want to come and take those classes now. *g* I would have loved a course like this when I was at uni - as it was fantasy and sci fi were generally looked down on by those students and lecturers not actually writing it (at least until I met my Masters tutor).

For Man Made Men you could also include Marge Piercy's "Body of Glass", which works very well as a companion piece to "Frankenstein".

[torrilin.livejournal.com]

You have Zenna Henderson! Yay!

I think some Schmidtz and more pulpy female authors probably would be useful/helpful, but most of your segments would make a pretty solid upper division college/standalone grad level course. And some of 'em are pretty packed. (tho I guess you could do the psionics in SF course, which lets you show off Garrett as well as pulpier female authors, Schmidtz and the dialogue with Heinlein and some of the other "respectable" types)

I can see why you're using Jone's Dalemark quartet, and from a bend their mind into pretzels standpoint, I'd prefer the Chrestomanci secondary world.

Unless the secondary work on SF has advanced a lot in the last 10 years, you'll have a terrible time finding stuff that applies to Bradbury and A Clockwork Orange. Nevermind anything that is likely to be fun for the students.

[libskrat]

For a Dunsany weird tale, perhaps "The Exiles Club" or "The Probable Adventure of the Three Literary Men."

Or "Chu-bu and Sheemish" just because it is charming.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, come on, no watching "Doctor Who?"

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

The sum total of my experience with Doctor Who is some episodes of the fourth Doctor (whom I adore, but that's beside the point). Eventually, I will get around to Eccleston and Tennant, but it hasn't happened yet. So I have no opinions one way or the other about the teachability of same.

[rarelylynne.livejournal.com]

If you want any pointers or have questions, michaeldthomas and I have you covered...including the reference library.

Most of the academic materials on Who is not so good. But getting better, I hope.

[jazzfish]

I got my introduction to Delany through _Triton_ in a utopia/dystopia-centric SFF class in college, so that one's highly recommended.

Asimov's _The Gods Themselves_ is also faintly lunar, at least for the last third. (I kept thinking "Wow, JMF did this infinitely better," which really wasn't fair since he was writing at least fifteen ye4ars after Asimov.)

[maki-to13.livejournal.com]

Someone who teaches Clockwork Orange, Ninteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, and V for Ven-effing-detta is officially the best professor evAr...Seriously. Made of awesome.

[saltypepper.livejournal.com]

Thanks so much for this! I'm filling in gaps on my reading list. This is the class I WISH I'd taken back in my college days. Oh, let's be real, this is the class I wish had been OFFERED back then.

I would suggest Octavia Butler's xenogenesis trilogy in with your first contact list.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Utopia/dystopia - Naomi Mitchison, Solution 3 - utopia as a process not a place.
Contact, first and other - Naomi Mitchison, Memoirs of a Spacewoman, about a female communication-with-other-life-forms specialist

[(Anonymous)]

I'd suggest the Dark Beyond the Stars too, but I wouldn't know whether to put it in this category or Made Men.

[rosamund.livejournal.com]

Dalemark!

::gloms::

Must get them again.

[elmocho.livejournal.com]

C. L. Moore (Jirel) (read with Female, an unspeakably ghastly 1933 film that demonstrates exactly what Moore is subverting with Jirel)

Now I have to go watch Female. I think it's the only thing in the second Forbidden Hollywood set I haven't seen. I must learn of its unspeakable ghastliness.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Don't say I didn't warn you.

[elmocho.livejournal.com]

It doesn't look as fun as Night Nurse (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022208/). I wonder if it's late enough for trying to kowtow to the Code? IIRC, 1933-1934 was when things got a lot less interesting. From IMDB, it also looks like shifting directors from William Wellman to Michal Curtiz might have something to do with it. Curtiz got the final director credit. I have seldom seen a bad film from William Wellman.

[prettyarbitrary.livejournal.com]

There was an episode of Futurama where the crew has to visit the Moon for some reason. Fry's terribly excited because he always wanted to be an astronaut, but it turns out the Moon has been suburbanized, and the whole lunar rover/Sea of Tranquility package is now a tourist trap. Fry is thrilled anyway, because hey--people live on the Moon!

There might be a place for that sitting opposite Heinlein and that lot.

[elmocho.livejournal.com]

Not just suburbanized, but D-sneyfied! They had lost all touch of the original lunar exploration, mentioning the astronauts were something like their animatronic "Whalers on The Moon." Fry and Leela ended up in the wilderness outside the park and ended up finding the real Sea of Tranquility, which brought the thrill back for Fry.

[intertext.livejournal.com]

Yes. Very cool. In the Contact one, I would add Sheri S. Tepper, Grass

I would also want to find a place for Carter's The Fortunate Fall somewhere. You don't have a cyber-punk niche?

[darksybarite.livejournal.com]

That's probably my favorite Tepper novel! And I'm ashamed to say that it took me an extreeeeemely long time to realize what was tying all of her worlds together.

[jenavira.livejournal.com]

Oh man but I have a ton of secondary readings for some of those lists...somewhere. I took a class called "Modern Mythologies" my last semester as an undergrad, and it was much, much too huge to do in one semester, but we did do compare and contrast with Genesis and Arthur C. Clarke and that made me happy. (The year before I did a gothics class with the same prof, and oh the vampire analysis. I miss that prof.)

[darksybarite.livejournal.com]

I would LOVE to take these modules, even though Heinlein's sex-politics occasionally makes me want to pull my hair out :S

And I think that Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy would be a great addition to the "Contact" module: first contact taken to the limits, and then explored.

Secondary Reading

[noondreams.livejournal.com]

I'm sure you don't have the time, but I'd highly recommend The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction and Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places, both by Ursula K. Le Guin. I've enjoyed all that I've read of her fiction, but I like her nonfiction even more.

Secondary-World Fantasy

[girlpunksamurai.livejournal.com]

I stumbled onto this journal, read a bit of it, finally realized this was the journal of one of my top 20 fav authors (out of 322,153,675 altogether :]) and couldn't believe my luck since I haven't been a member on.

So, some Secondary-World Fantasy that I've read and thought of. That I liked-leaving out ones set within the modern world and yet at the same time totally different-we'll be here all frickin' year if I try naming all of those.

David&Leigh Eddings and the world from their series The Belgariad and The Mallorean, as well as Belgarath The Sorcerer, and Polgara The Sorceress

Lois McMaster Bujold and the world she introduced with her trilogy titled; The Sharing Knife series: 1)Beguilement, 2)Legacy, and 3)Passage. I have heard there may yet be a 4th book on this, but i'm not 100% certain

Karen Miller and the world she introduced with two of a trilogy she ahs released so far; the series is called The Godspeaker, and the two books out on it are called Empress and The Riven Kingdom respectively

Maria V. Snyder and the world she introduced with her trilogy (no series title, just the titles themselves) Poison Study, Magic Study, and Fire Study

Ed Greenwood and the world he introduced with The Band Of Four series, titled; The Vacant Throne, The Kingless Land, A Dragon's Ascension, and The Dragon's Doom.

Jim Butcher and the world he introduced in the Codex Alera series, with the four books and the fifth one coming out in November; Furies of Calderon, Academ's Fury, Cursor's Fury, Captain's Fury, and the one due in November, which is Princeps' Fury

Terry Brooks and her latest series of Shannara, The Genesis Of Shannara. I'm listing no titles since I suspect I'm running out of character space :]

Jacqueline Carey and the world she introduced in her Kushiel's Legacy series; Kushiel's Dart, Kushiel's Chosen, Kushiel's Avatar, Kushiel's Scion, Kushiel's Justice, and Kushiel's Mercy

E.E. Knight and the world he introduced in his Vampire Earth series; Way of the Wolf, Choice of the Cat, Tale of the Thunderbolt, Valentine's Rising, Valentine's Exile, Valentine's Resolve, and finally, Fall with Honor-which I suspect may be the conclusion to the series though I wouldn't place money on it.

I could probably think of more, but that's enough for one post, lol. All good authors, good books, and highly enjoyable. Is it just me, or does it seem like the guys in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section tend to write their worlds within more modern times? O.o