I’m starting to finalize…

I'm starting to finalize my syllabus for my minority authors in spec fic class; going to keep some notes here. The difficulty, as always, is deciding what should stay, and what to leave out. I picked up half a dozen Delany novels from the library yesterday -- which one should I have them read? Keeping in mind that the longer and more obscure a text is, the more likely that some of the students won't make it through (Dhalgren is just out, I'm afraid), and that the more actual books I put in the course, ditto. It's tempting to say, 16-week course, have them read sixteen substantial books, but that's a recipe for frustration and failure, even in a 400-level class like this one.

So it'll be mostly short stories, and the books chosen will need to be carefully collected. And the books need to be in print. Thoughts / suggestions as I work on this are welcome. I'm going to keep editing this entry for a day or two, at least. Here's the master list of texts I'm drawing from, collected last spring.

Tentative syllabus for The Invisible Made Visible: Writers and Worlds of Color in Speculative Fiction

Confirmed titles:

• Cosmos Latinos
• Dark Matter
• something by Butler
• Samuel Delany, Aye, and Gomorrah: and Other Stories; Babel-17 / Empire Star
• Hiromi Goto, Half-World
• Nalo Hopkinson, Midnight Robber

Possibles (more to be added):

• Juan Jose Arreola, "Baby H.P.," 1952 (Cosmos Latinos)
• Tobias Buckell, Crystal Rain?
• Octavia Butler, Bloodchild or Dawn?
• more Delany, if there's room: Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand or Nova or Tales of Neveryon (start there, or with one of other books in the series?)
• N.K. Jemisin, One Hundred Thousand Kingdoms?
• Nnedi Okorafor, Who Fears Death?
• Miguel de Unamuno, "Mechanopolis," (1913) (in public domain / Cosmos Latinos)

And of course there's always the questions of whether I present what I consider an author's best work, or the work that ties most strongly to themes of race / ethnicity, or to other themes that show up frequently in these texts?

Some thematic framings (more to come):

• Utopias
• Our Frightening Future (robots/mechanics/technology; nuclear holocaust)
• The Power of the State (authoritarian regimes; revolution; corporations as government)
• The Alien / Other
• The Uses of Language
• Feminism
• Sexualities
• Religion / Spirituality

to be continued...