Imaginative Fiction: Science Fiction and Fantasy

In his introduction to McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, editor Michael Chabon laments, "As late as about 1950, if I referred to 'short fiction,' I might have been talking about any one of the following kinds of stories: the ghost story; the horror story; the detective story; the story of suspense, terror, fantasy, or the macabre; the sea, adventure, spy, war, or historical story; the romance story." Today, of course, if readers were to go looking for science fiction or fantasy stories (to say nothing of the other genres Chabon references) in their local bookstore, they would find them shunted to their own section, safely cordoned off from the aisles of "mainstream" fiction. In this course, we will examine, from a writerly perspective, the nature of that divide. Is it merited? Are science fiction and fantasy stories so fundamentally different in their construction from their conventional counterparts as to require a radically different approach, and if so, what unique devices do writers of imaginative fiction employ to set their stories apart? Our guide in this exploration will be Jeff Vandermeer's Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction, which we will be considering not just as an instruction manual, but as a representative text. How does Wonderbook-in its content, construction, and conceit-differ from more standard writing reference books? How is it similar? In what ways does Vandermeer's guide embody its subject matter? To aid us in this examination, we will be considering contemporary science fiction and fantasy stories by writers on both sides of the genre fence. The purpose of our reading is generative as well as illustrative. We seek to employ what we learn. There will be multiple writing exercises building towards a ten-to-twenty-page science fiction or fantasy story which students will submit to be workshopped by their peers in class. As a final project, students will revise their story and submit it along with their
Course Attributes: EN H; AS HUM

Imaginative Fiction: Science Fiction and Fantasy

WRITING 3208

Section 01