“Good heavens, Miss Sakamoto, you’re beautiful!”

When you teach Chaucer or 19th-century medievalism, no one clamors for a preview of the syllabus, but when you tell people you’ll pulling together a course on modern fantasy and science fiction, everyone has opinions, questions, recommendations, stories, and gripes—and everyone wants to see the reading list.

So here it is. From the start, I tried to avoid creating one of those “sources and analogues” courses where Poe ballads and old French werewolf yarns implicitly apologize for the presumed deficiencies of modern fantasy. (It’s a valid approach, but spending so much time studying where something comes from leaves little time to study the thing itself.) We’ll talk about Lucian of Samosata, Thomas More, and Mary Shelley, and we’ll give H.G. Wells his due, but we don’t need to disinter their corpses for caryatids; let’s see if recent works can stand on their own. If they can’t, their collapse will at least raise an impressive dust cloud from afar.

This list balances several competing goals: sketching the histories of both genres to 1990; showing their ideological ranges by intermingling fan favorites with academic darlings; assigning works not for their coolness quotient or erstwhile popularity but for their ability to prompt discussion; and selfishly finding slots for a favorite or two of my own.

Plenty of worthy authors, books, and short stories didn’t make the cut—it’s impossible to be comprehensive in thirteen weeks—and this course was, I think, harder to prepare than any of the medieval-lit courses I’ve taught. I’m not used to being so spoiled for choice.

Isaac Asimov, “Nightfall”
Arthur C. Clarke, “The Nine Billion Names of God”
Robert A. Heinlein, “The Roads Must Roll”
Tom Godwin, “The Cold Equations”
Lester del Rey, “Helen O’Loy”
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers
Samuel Delany, “Aye, and Gomorrah”
Ray Bradbury, “Way in the Middle of the Air”
Frederik Pohl, “The Day After the Day the Martians Came”
James Tiptree, Jr., “The Women Men Don’t See”
William Gibson, “Burning Chrome”
Octavia Butler, “Bloodchild”
Joanna Russ, “The Clichés From Outer Space”
Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Walter Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Liebowitz
Henry Melton, “Catacomb”
* * *
Ludwig Tieck, “The Elves”
William Morris, “The Folk of the Mountain Door”
Christina Rossetti, “Goblin Market”
James Branch Cabell, “The Thin Queen of Elfhame”
Robert E. Howard, “The Tower of the Elephant”
Robert E. Howard, “The King and the Oak”
Robert E. Howard, “Solomon Kane’s Homecoming”
Jack Vance, “The Loom of Darkness”
Fritz Leiber, “The Bazaar of the Bizarre”
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
Terry Bisson, “Bears Discover Fire”
Ursula Le Guin, “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight”
Lucius Shepard, “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule”
Gary Gygax, “The Influence of J.R.R. Tolkien on the D&D and AD&D Games”
Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn
Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings”
Italo Calvino, “The Distance of the Moon”