first lecture

Robot fanfare to open the course.

The visual future.

This guy likes cyberpunk.

Let's play a game. A brief not-especially-woke but favorable review of the game.

Fan culture worldwide, and in New Zealand. At Harvard itself. And at MIT.

Theodore von Holst's 1831 frontispiece to a book written earlier and made even more famous later.

Mythical tech. Mythical biotech.

The H. G. Wells Society. H. G. Wells looks worried.

Hugo Gernsback's Radio News and Amazing Stories.

Issues of Astounding Science Fiction, from 1939, and from 1950.

A paperback illustator's Mesklin.

More on the Cartmill affair. An A-bomb diagram.

Chesley Bonestell: spacecraft.

A beautiful robot B.E.M. head.

You can't avoid Robert A. Heinlein.

Stuff engineers like.

We can't avoid politics.

Neither can superheroes, who are indeed SF.

Also SF: near-future authoritarian dystopias. And giant hurricanes.

Mapping More's Utopia. Peter Fitting on Utopian studies.

Critics make theories of sf, and more theories.

SF as an experiment, with the real world, or realist fiction, as control.

Book cover for Ishiguro.

A poster for the midcentury film Destination Moon.

Later sf on TV. And on film, not necessarily popular American film.

Ice melts in Antarctica. Kim Stanley Robinson is right to worry about it.

The academic journal Science Fiction Studies.

The official Harvard College Canvas site for our course.

Everybody should read Strange Horizons.

You might also consider helping Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction.

Also relevant: Lightspeed. Current issue of Apex.

And Clarkesworld. And of course LCRW.

Podcasts can be SF. Nightvale, maybe. Bright Sessions, certainly.

Near future dystopia trends. Sandra Newman, for example. And yes, this.