Teaching American Dystopia: The Reading List

I'm teaching a course called "Dystopia and American Anxiety" this spring.  The idea came to me while brainstorming with friends on Facebook.  Because dystopia is a genre the frequently plays upon our fears and anxieties, it seemed fitting to put together a course specific to the American side of the skill.  The following is the reading list for the course:

The Best of 2012: What were your favorite books, movies, etc.?

The 2013 WISB Awards are fast approaching, but I want to know what your favorite reads, views, and so on were this year.

So this post is for you, dear readers.  Let me know what you loved reading, watching, listening to, and so on and so forth.  Go on, leave a comment!

Guest Post: Why Fantasy? by Bruno Stella

But why fantasy?

Is it enough to say that people the world over (including myself) have been fascinated with elves and dragons since Tolkien published his master-work and so we can simply continue in his footsteps? Haven’t many authors have done exactly that?

Surely, fantasy is an easy field to write – and do well in?

After all, the scientific understanding for writing, say, hard sci-fi is not necessary. And, because fantasy isn’t exactly high-brow, knowledge of fancy literary theories isn’t necessary, either – in fact it may even be a hindrance.

I’d argue that fantasy is hard to do decently precisely because of the reasons above.

So many people have done it to death, that the reader is jaded by the recycled materials. There is no powerful central scientific concept to bedazzle the reader, nor is there the fig-leaf of fancy

Guest Post: How to Characterize Christ in a Novel by Cotton E. Davis

When I presumed to make Yeshua bar Yosef (Christ) a character in my recently released time-travel novel TimeWarp, Inc., I had to make numerous decisions regarding how to portray him.

The physical part wasn't as difficult as one might imagine.  Though the New Testament leaves us with no physical description of the man, Isaiah 53:2 described the coming Messiah as rather ordinary looking.  No Max von Sydows or Jeffrey Hunters here.  I set aside the classical image of a blond-haired, blue-eyed European-looking gent for a swarthier dark-brown or black-haired fellow more in keeping with the Jews who inhabited Lower Galilee at the time.  Short-cropped hair and beards were the style among Jewish men then, so goodby to the luxuriant locks seen in so many paintings and movies.  One more fact: most skulls unearthed from the first-century holy land were rounder than the traditional long-faced image.  Decidedly so.

I also made my character well-formed.  Physically powerful, even.  This was not the namby-

10 Years Ago Today: Chemo

There are a lot of things I don't remember about finding out I had cancer in 2002.  But I do remember the day I began treatments:  today.  That's right.  Two days before Christmas, I had my first round of ABVD (adriamycin, bleomycin, vinblastine, and dacarbazine -- a.k.a. four ways to poison yourself in order to get healthy).  One of these drugs (vinblastine), as it turns out, is a kind of orange-red, which runs through your system and turns your pee, well, orange.  The doctors like to tell you this beforehand, because usually orange or red pee means something has gone seriously wrong with your innards.  Ironically, peeing orange after a treatment of vinblastine still means something is going on in your innards, but in a kind of good way (good bad?  Grey.  We'll go with that).  This was one of the few things I laughed about when I went through the chemo process.  After all, it is kind of hilarious, no?

In any case, I had my first treatment on Dec. 23rd, 2002 and spent Christmas feeling somewhat like garbage.  I'm fortunate in that most of the immediate side effects attributed to ABVD were fairly mild.  There was no intense vomiting (though I'd get a little nauseous at times).  I did feel like I'd gone to a party the night before, drank enough alcohol to kill a horse, and then woke up the following morning feeling pretty much as you'd expect:  extremely exhausted with a side of craptacular.

Beyond that, I don't remember much.  I remember that the nurse who worked at the oncologist's office was an incredibly nice lady with a lovely attitude and that my mom sat with me through most of the treatment (I owe a lot to my mom, if I'm being honest -- she took the brunt of all the financial stress, scheduling, and so on while I tried to combat my disease; she's a hero in my book and a testament to how important it is to have family (however you define it) during times like this).  And I remember feeling like crap while the drugs were funneling into my veins.  You literally feel them eating away at you, like those overnight effects of a nasty cold where you just know that you're going to wake up feeling awful.  The only good thing about chemo, I guess, is that they give you good pain killers and a lot of excuses to sleep and sleep and sleep.  I slept a lot... Oh, and you can pretty much eat whatever you want, so long as you get the necessary nutrients.  Why?  Because chemo ruins your appetite and tends to eat away at your body mass.  Anything to keep your weight from crashing and your body from completely eating itself alive is generally OK.  I made a lot of fruit smoothies...

So there you have it.  I'll blog about how I was diagnosed in the future.  But since today is kind of a milestone -- ten years, baby -- I thought I'd blog about it.  Plus, I recently had my ten year "checkup," in which my oncologist in Florida basically said "well, it ain't back, so you're good to go."  I like such appointments!

There's much more to tell, for sure.  I'll do my best to collect my memories.

P.S.:  Earlier this year, I was inspired by Jay Lake to blog about my experiences with cancer.  Jay has shared many of his experiences on his blog and was kind enough to talk about how terminal cancer affects him as a writer on my podcast.  He's an extraordinary human being.  I recommend you check out his books.

Cloning Myself?

Would you clone yourself if you have the opportunity to do so?  I sometimes think it would be strange to clone myself (the scifi kind of cloning, where clones are literal, full-grown copies).  What kind of strange conversations would we have?  Would we each develop differently over time so that the only resemblance between us was physical?

Science fiction writers have asked these questions for decades.  Why?  I don't know.  Maybe we're secretly narcissists?  Or maybe there's just something fascinating about the idea that humanity is duplicable.  After all, if science fiction is, as many suggest, a genre deeply concerned with the human condition, then cloning is merely a "new" avenue through which we can interrogate what it is

Becoming Pretentious Over Time -- Cue Pipes, Long Diatribes About Literature, and Writing

Fact One:  Apparently button-up shirts, nice ties, nice sweaters, and nice slacks are my new thing.  They're so much "my new thing" that I'm wearing them even though I have no intention of leaving the house (I'm currently sitting at a table on a houseboat that overlooks the Columbia).

Hello!  I'm a houseboat on the Columbia.  You'll have to excuse
me for not having anything green growing.  It's winter, which
typically means that nature decides to hibernate...unless you
live in Florida, where nature is constantly trying to kill you...

I see all this as my slow decline into pretentiousness.  Call it an evolutionary pathway for all PhD students.  The longer you stay in academia, the more likely you are to fall into its grasp, from which no human being can escape!

And if I'm falling into the pretentious hole of wonders, where my days are spent contemplating my research or the literary merits of obscure small press novels (hey, they're good, so shut up), then I might as well embrace it, right?  No?  Really?  Oh.  Good.  Glad that's settled.

All this is a really abstract way of explaining that things are changing around these parts.  I've finished with Fall Semester's insane grading cycle and have begun this thing they call vacation.  At some point, I'm going to start writing fiction again, because I'll have the time to actually think about stories and narrative and characters (90 hour work weeks make that somewhat difficult, to be honest).

On top of that, I'm going to do some more reading (partly for interviews I've got lined up with some amazing folks and partly for my own enjoyment).

And some where in all that, I'll blog about more literature-related stuff (some SF/F, some not), more movies, more things that interest me (and, by extension, you).  Wish me luck or something.

-------------------------------------------------------

P.S.:  If there must be a second fact, it is this -- somewhere in all this strangeness is an elf with a missing sock; he wants it back and will kill for it.  Watch yourselves.