Last Class 2022

The familiar giant triangle

SF as warning.

SF as wonder.

SF as explanation.

A future history timeline compiled from high quality SF.

A historical dictionary of SF.

What if it's ALL SF?

The sweetest, best space cartooning, one more time.

What's special about television. And about feature film.

Brenda Shaughnessy, I Have a Time Machine. The book.

Franny Choi, Field Trip. The book.

The Angel of the North.

The creator's own view of the famous monument.

Thank you for hanging out with us this term.

Nalo Hopkinson

Afrofuturism. In music: hip-hop as in Deltron 3030. Calypso: for example, Sugar Aloes, "Signs of the End Times."

Hopkinson's own page (some broken links). Her essay "Code Sliding" about writing Midnight Robber.

A useful interview with Hopkinson. An even more useful interview. A terrific and more recent interview.

The Caribbean background. For example, Trinidad, and Jamaica.

One of many available images of Toussaint L'Ouverture.

THIS IS A COMIC WINGS: A COMIC

The most frequently circulated image of Granny Nanny of the Maroons.

Another source for her Web.

A solicitation for Marcus Garvey's Black Star Line.

A still from a production of Aime Cesaire's A Tempest, at Lafayette College.


Some English guy whom Hopkinson rewrites.

Cross-section of an Atlantic slave ship: the Middle Passage.

A monster puppet from Carnival in Toronto, where Hopkinson now lives.

A Midnight Robber from Carnival.

A famous former (or current?) Jamaican Maroon settlement.

The sugar cane slave economy.

A good father: the nonhuman daddy tree.

A decidedly non-scholarly, but edifying, guide to Trinidad and Tobago folklore.

Indigenous Caribbean peoples.

Not the same thing on which other comedies end.

Split paths.

A good choice for a given name.

Greg Egan, Charlie Jane Anders, Rebecca Roanhorse

Greg Egan's author site.

The full text of Egan's novella "Oceanic."

World-building at one scale. And at another.

Philip K. Dick's lecture: "How to Build a Universe..."

An earlier, much-noted work with a gendered novum.

SF as experiment.

Famous people named Martin. Famous people named Daniel.

Not quite, but not unrelated to, the beliefs on Covenant.

Not this kind of bridge.

The argument from design.

Is faith a chemical?

"Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience."

Best picture, 1990. Another useful picture.



Review: the science-fictional triangle whose points are explanation, and wonder and warnings about the unknowable or unknown.

Review: sf as experiment, real world and realist fiction as controls.

Review: the novum. Novums within novums.

William Gibson; Alan Turing

How cyberspace used to look.

A very good reference site for Turing, maintained by Turing's biographer, Andrew Hodges. The same site's index.

An Enigma machine.

Dilbert's boss takes a Turing Test.

Extremely effective, and therefore unpredictable, learning machines.

Neuromancer, the game, the first edition, another early edition.

An elegant nonacademic reference site for Gibson, with pages specific to Neuromancer (site has been up and down lately).

Riding the monorail in the real Chiba City, Japan.

A dead television channel?

In the midst of life we are in something else.

The same cultural moment as this famous film.

Some complicated visual information (the Tokyo subway). A lot more (not specific to computers) about the visual display of information.

OMNI magazine. Another early issue. Another issue, apparently with Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic."

One metaphor for personality. With an early-80s look.

The arcade game that must be one source for how cyberspace looks.

A world of commerce and commerce. And then, not commerce.

Whether it's wires or wetware, data has to be stored somewhere.

Something's up with vision. A symbol for cyberpunk. The resulting anthology.

New ways to move through space, or think about space.

Who controls what territory, what space?

Haitian voodoo divinities.

The end of the novel repeats a famous quest.

So does this work of art, and this one, with this guy.

What people thought high tech images looked like in the early 1980s: two minutes of highlights from the movie TRON.

James Tiptree, Jr.

A source for a name.

A warmer collection.

The source for another pseudonym.

Another radical version of feminist sf.

Pheromones in another mammal.

They're just molecules.

Homages to more advanced (or "advanced") cultures we don't understand (yet): like a cargo cult.

Not just the sex drive, but the wish to escape.

"We are built to dream outwards."

"Girl" anticipated a cultural movement.

Who needs real bodies?

Anthony Van Dyck's Cupid and Psyche (1640). The story of Cupid and Psyche, adapted from Apuleius and retold by Thomas Bulfinch (1855).

Instinctive, arguably biological reactions of attraction and aversion.

"The Song of Hiawatha," entire, and in a sample from the first book.

Blake's peach thief.

A lot more William Blake.

Women and night time.

Time to leave this behind?

Leaving Earth, and leaving realism, behind in time and space.

Maybe we don't want to lose this sort of thing, or this either.

Ways, short and long-term, for representing time.

Alice Bradley's first husband, the poet and novelist William Davey ("green hill against sunrise" &c.) (via Greta Friar).

An acoustic homage to Tiptree's works.

Take me to the river.

Jack London (and a bit of Delany and Zoline)

Quite a lot of Jack London online, through Sonoma State Univ.

The San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, as photographed by (possibly) London himself.

More earthquake: SF City Hall after the quake and fire, again in a photo that may be by London himself.

Attractive pack animals. Violent but attractive herd animals. The results of predation.

West Coast beaches and the end of humanity (Shell Beach, Sonoma County).

"The Scarlet Plague" in a new, better academic edition online.

More of London's sf. His famous book-length proto-fascist dystopia.

London was in some ways against white supremacy, but in some ways horrifyingly racist.

"The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry."

Delany's "Aye, and Gomorrah" now online.

Dangerous Visions.

Welcome to Istanbul.

Entropic disorder. Another order and entropic disorder.

Another order and disorder.


A symbol for older SF.

Dr. Weiner's neighborhood.

The world will end in fire and/or ice.

Frederik Pohl's Gateway

A massive, but non-academic, list of Pohl's works, and a recent interview.

The first three chapters of Pohl's memoir, The Way the Future Was.

Gateway, the spinoff video game.

Reacting against the Campbell ethos.

A lot of Galaxy magazine.

Everything we know about the Heechee.


We may have a sense of wonder, but that's not why people really take risks.

An old-time old-time prospector.

What you don't see in Gateway.

The role of chance in American life. The really big role of chance in American life.

One analogy for the Gateway asteroid.

Another analogy for the Gateway asteroid.

Another analogy for the Gateway asteroid.

Pohl can't believe in him. Does Pohl believe him instead?

A real psychoanalyst from the late 1960s.

Computer simulation of light and motion around a black hole. (How to weigh a black hole.)

Another (groan) plot-relevant black hole.

A sequel. Another sequel. And another.