How Great Science Fiction Works – A Course in SF by Gary K. Wolfe

Posted on February 29, 2016 by James Wallace Harris in Books, Events // 1 Comment

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

Gary K. Wolfe

Mark J. McPherson // March 1, 2016 at 4:35 pm //

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.