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

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.