Teaching Science Fiction

Essays on teaching classic and lesser-known works of science fiction

In its often dystopian and apocalyptic visions of a world yet to come, science fiction wrestles with important issues of our time and can help prepare us for a future that seems very much in flux. Addressing texts from the late nineteenth century to the present, Teaching Science Fiction will help instructors introduce science fiction's power to draw readers into alternate worlds in order to mirror the possibilities—both positive and negative—present in our own.

The essays in this volume use various theoretical lenses—including utopian theory, feminist rhetorical studies, game studies, and environmental humanities—to foreground the sociopolitical aspect of science fiction and its relation to social justice. Essays shine a light on feminist and postcolonial utopias, ecofiction, ethnofuturism, and Indigenous futurism, some of the many manifestations of science fiction that seek to interrogate conceptualizations of race, gender, ethnicity, language, and species.

This volume contains discussion of Bong Joon Ho, Snowpiercer; Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars; Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower and Kindred; Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland; Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go; Larissa Lai, "Rachel"; Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness; Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem; George Miller, Mad Max: Fury Road; John Milton, Paradise Lost; Toshio Mori, Yokohama, California; Sequoia Nagamatsu, How High We Go in the Dark; Alex Rivera, Sleep Dealer; Star Trek; Star Wars; Jules Verne, Voyages extraordinaires (Extraordinary Voyages); Martha Wells, All Systems Red; Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse.