How Great Science Fiction Works – A Course in SF by Gary K. Wolfe
If you’ve ever wanted to take a course in the history of science fiction, The Teaching Company has just released How Great Science Fiction Works by Gary K. Wolfe, as part of The Great Courses series of video and audio lectures. Members of Audible.com can snag a copy for just one credit. The 24-lecture series lists for $149.95 to $269.95 at The Teaching Company, but as fans of that company knows, it’s best to wait for their regular sales. The course comes with a 215-page pdf ebook that works as a textbook.
Wolfe’s knowledge of science fiction literature is wide-ranging and insightful. Each 30-minute lecture follows a theme, usually covering 2-5 books, that builds towards a complete history of the genre. Wolfe has written several books about science fiction, reviews for Locus Magazine, and edited the Library of America’s American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s.
There are a total twelve hours of lecture, which is much shorter than a standard semester. And the number of books discussed far exceeds what a required reading list for a graduate course would require. I’d be curious which 10-12 books Wolfe would expect his students to read in the course of a regular semester.
Wolfe easily convinces me that I need to read the books I haven’t, maybe a quarter of the list, and go back and study the others more carefully. He ties the genre together, almost in a holographic fashion, showing how science fictional ideas emerged through the decades and centuries, to evolve patterns over and over again. Many cherished concepts in modern science fiction novels, that new readers think of as recent mind blowing ideas, were already explored by H. G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon in the years 1895-1937.
The following novels are among those discussed. Because I like to judge works by date, I’ve put them in order of publication, but they are grouped by theme by Wolfe’s lectures. Some titles are mentioned in more than one lecture.
- 1516 – Utopia by Thomas More
- 1818 – Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley
- 1865 – From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne
- 1889 – A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain
- 1895 – The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
- 1898 – The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
- 1912 – The Scarlet Plague by Jack London
- 1917 – A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
- 1924 – We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
- 1930 – Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon
- 1937 – Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon
- 1946 – Slan: A Novel by A. E. van Vogt
- 1946 –The Skylark of Space by E. E. “Doc” Smith
- 1949 – Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
- 1949 – Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
- 1950 – I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
- 1950 – The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
- 1951 – The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov
- 1953 – Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke
- 1953 – Fahrenheit 451: A Novel by Ray Bradbury
- 1953 – The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth
- 1954 – Invasion of the Body Snatchers by Jack Finney
- 1956 – Cities in Flight by James Blish
- 1956 – The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke
- 1957 – The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
- 1958 – A Case Of Conscience by James Blish
- 1959 – Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein
- 1960 – A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.
- 1960 – Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys
- 1961 – Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
- 1961 – Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein (Ace)
- 1962 – The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
- 1963 – Orphans of the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein
- 1965 – Dune by Frank Herbert
- 1966 – Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
- 1969 – The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
- 1971 – The World Inside by Robert Silverberg
- 1972 – The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner
- 1973 – Crash by J. G. Ballard
- 1973 – Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke (Spectra)
- 1974 – The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
- 1974 – Walk to the End of the World by Suzy Mckee Charnas
- 1975 – The Female Man by Joanna Russ
- 1976 – The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin
- 1977 – In the Ocean of Night by Gregory Benford
- 1980 – The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
- 1981 – Downbelow Station by C. J. Cherryh
- 1984 – Neuromancer by William Gibson
- 1985 – The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
- 1987 – Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks
- 1990 – Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree Jr.
- 1991 – Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler
- 1992 – Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
- 1992 – Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
- 1993 – Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
- 1993 – Ring by Stephen Baxter
- 1996 – The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
- 1998 – Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson
- 2000 – Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds
- 2000 – Zeitgeist by Bruce Sterling
- 2002 – Evolution by Stephen Baxter
- 2002 – Light by M. John Harrison
- 2004 – Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson
- 2006 – The Road by Cormac McCarthy
- 2011 – Osama by Lavie Tidhar
- 2015 – Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson
- 2015 – Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
- 2015 – The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor
- 2015 – The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi
Thanks for the heads up on this! I’ve listened to a few other “Great Courses” where the lack of visual reference made things a little hard to follow (physics) but that doesn’t seem likely to be a problem with this title and hopefully Audible users can download the pdf of the course materials. A good line-up, most, but not all, I’ve read. Personally, I’d like to see more Lem and the Strugatsky Brother’s “Roadside Picnic” included but there’s no accounting for taste. I know it’s essentially a literary history of SF, but the cited works suggests it may be a little long on the pre and early history.