Science Fiction Studies

#110 = Volume 37, Part 1 = March 2010

NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE

Olympia’s Daughters: E.T.A. Hoffmann and Philip K. Dick. The as yet unacknowledged influence of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” (1814) on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) is evident in the parallel between Rick Deckard’s admiration of the android opera singer, Luba Luft, and the attraction exerted by Hoffman’s singing automaton, Olympia, over his poet-protagonist, Nathanael.

In her excellent study of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Patricia Warrick reports that Dick’s use of doubles, or pairs of symbolically linked characters, was influenced by Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, which was first staged in 1881, the year after Offenbach’s death. The opera incorporates Hoffmann’s story:

The life-size windup doll in that opera first gave him the idea for a female robot. He was intrigued by the tale when he encountered it in the opera in the 1940s and as a result began to read the short stories of the German writer, E.T.A. Hoffman [sic], including “The Sandman” (1814), the source for the mechanical woman in Offenbach’s opera. (Warrick 119)

Warrick goes on to argue that “in Dick’s use of the mechanical double to mirror man’s fragmentation as he adulates reason and ignores the intuitive self, he has made a major contribution to the literature of the Doppelgänger” (130). Yet even Warrick fails to appreciate the significance of Dick’s debt to Hoffmann. In addition to their mutual interest in music, Hoffmann and Dick shared deep interests in automata, in psychology, and in metaphysics. Dick acknowledged during telephone conversations with Warrick that he had read Hoffmann’s “The Sandman”; and in Lies, Inc (a 2004 republication of The Unteleported Man [1966]), he names a corporation “Trails of Hoffman Limited,” a tongue-in-cheek reference to Offenbach’s operatic adaptation of Hoffmann’s story.

Hoffmann was strongly interested in automata. As his biographer Harvey Hewett-Thayer points out, he recorded in his diary in 1802 that he “determined sometime to try his hand at the construction of an automaton” (167).“That Hoffmann examined automatons whenever opportunity offered is probable. The purely mechanical aspect of their construction, the artful deceptiveness of their accomplishments, fascinated him” (Hewett-Thayer 178). Both Hoffmann and Dick wrote about female automata towards which/whom protagonists experience a romantic attraction, and both artists shared a view of automata as psychologically symbolic and revealing.

Symbolically, Hoffmann and Dick use such constructed beings to criticize the predominance, in individuals and society at large, of cold reason over empathy and intuition. In “The Sandman,” the romantic character Nathanael is contrasted psychologically with his fiancée Klara, who is a model of enlightenment rationality (or, as her translated name suggests, clarity). Hoffmann’s narrator reveals that “many chided Klara for being cold, without feeling, and unimaginative” (291); and throughout the story Klara’s “cold nature” is emphasized (286, 292, 293). Moreover, after reading a letter from Klara, Nathanael complains to his friend Lothar that “No doubt you are giving her lessons in logic so that she is learning to sift and analyze everything very neatly. Do stop that!” (287). Later, Nathanael again refers to “that disagreeable analytical letter,” explaining that it so irritated him that he will refrain from writing to Klara for two weeks (288). The temperamental differences between Klara and Nathanael climax with her phlegmatic and condescending response to his fervid and soul-stirring reading of a poem he has written about his deepest fears. “You damned, lifeless automaton,” cries Nathanael before running off (294). Klara’s seeming inability to respond in an empathic, emotionally appropriate way to Nathanael’s situation, and especially to his disturbing poem, offers suggestive evidence that she is, at least psychologically, a “lifeless automaton.”

Hoffmann underscores this criticism of Klara by introducing the automaton Olympia as her ironically symbolic double. Nathanael, humorously enough, later falls in love with this mechanical wooden doll, mistaking her for a living being and finding in her a more congenial companion than his flesh-and-blood fiancée. John Ellis explains that

There is ... a surface level of the text which makes fun of Nathanael for not being able to distinguish between an automaton and a real person. But there is a deeper and more important level of satire which reverses the direction of the first; here, it is ordinary people that are satirized for being so automaton-like that they might be mistaken for automatons, or an automaton mistaken for a real person .... Olimpia’s [sic] function, then, is not to contrast unfavorably with real people, but to dramatize how automaton-like they have become; and this general function is particularly true in the case of Clara [sic]. (11-12)

Finally, emphasizing Klara’s unemotional and robotic response to Nathanael’s death at the end of the story, Ellis concludes that “Her behavior is programmed, and even a horrendous experience has no effect on the program” (12). What, we are forced to ask, is the real difference between a human and an automaton?

Dick’s novel is like Hoffmann’s tale in its symbolic use of artificially-created beings to critique the rational yet emotionally isolated human mind. As Dick wrote elsewhere, “A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake” (“Man” 211). Such beings, he says, “fall within the clinical entity ‘schizoid’” (211). “In the field of abnormal psychology, the schizoid personality structure is well defined; in it there is a continual paucity of feeling. The person thinks rather than feels his way through life” (Dick, “Android” 201). In Dick’s novel, such human characters as the bounty-hunter Phil Resch demonstrate no more (perhaps less) human empathy than the androids he is employed to “retire,” whereas apparently empathetic characters such as the opera singer Luba Luft are nominally androids. We find ourselves, like Hoffmann’s Nathanael, unable to discern human from inhuman and are forced to question the meaningfulness of conventional distinctions.

In both “The Sandman” and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? confusion over exactly who (or what) is or is not human also reflects Hoffmann’s and Dick’s existential outlook. At one point in Hoffmann’s story, a young Nathanael witnesses his father with the evil and mysterious character Coppelius as they apparently fashion eyeballs for eyeless human faces lying around them. Discovered in his hiding place, Nathanael is seized by Coppelius and narrates what happens next:

Coppelius shrieked with a shrill laugh, “but now we must carefully observe the mechanism of the hands and feet.” He thereupon seized me so violently that my joints cracked, unscrewed my hands and feet, then put them back, now this way, then another way. “There’s something wrong here! It’s better the way they were! The Old Man knew his business!” Coppelius hissed and muttered. But everything around me went pitch black; a sudden comvulsive [sic] pain flashed through my nerves and bones—I felt nothing more. (282)

Is Nathanael himself, perhaps without knowing it, an automaton? What is his father’s relationship to Coppelius, and are the two men actually constructing androids? No definitive answers are given, and the surreal quality of the experience resists naturalistic explanation. Rather, the seemingly mundane events of the tale are interfused with the intense and irrational surreality of a dream. The significance of the story, like human experience itself, cannot be wholly grasped by logic alone—which has led to wildly varying interpretations of Hoffmann’s story by generations of critics—most famously, by Sigmund Freud in “On the Uncanny” (1919).

Likewise, in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? the experiences of Rick Deckard and John Isidore while using the “empathy box” (178, 212), Deckard’s face-to-face encounter with Wilbur Mercer (220), and Deckard’s apparent merger with Mercer in the desert (230) all are episodes that resist logical explanation. In the complex (sur)reality of Dick’s novel, Wilbur Mercer can simultaneously be both a superior entity and an unemployed alcoholic, Al Jarry. And that Mercer’s double or alter-ego is named after the historical Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), whose work foreshadows both the theater of the absurd and the existentialist outlook of the Surrealists, underscores Dick’s romantic sensibility and metaphysical pluralism. Indeed, of the meaning of Dick’s novel, Warrick argues that “Certainly the most revealing clue of all is the allusion to Alfred Jary [sic], the French writer who held that hallucinations are superior to rational intelligence” (130). For Dick as for Hoffmann, emotions, intuition, and the unconscious are necessary for the apprehension of truth.

Furthermore, for both Hoffmann and Dick, artistic appreciation becomes a touchstone of psychic wholeness. A striking example of this can be seen in the parallels between Olympia and Luba Luft. Both are highly accomplished singers, and their skill as artists complicates the protagonists’ and readers’ reactions to them. As the narrator of “The Sandman” explains, “Olympia played the piano with great talent and also skillfully sang a bravura aria in a voice that was high-pitched, bell-like, almost shrill. Nathanael was completely enchanted.... Her skillful roulades appeared to him to be the heavenly exaltations of a soul transfigured by love” (299). To his friend Siegmund’s criticism of Olympia’s singing as “unpleasantly perfect, being as lifeless as a music box,” and the observation that she seems “to be playing the part of a human being,” Nathanael responds indignantly that “Olympia may indeed appear weird to you cold and unimaginative mortals” (302). That Nathanael views Olympia as human is partly a result of his heated imagination, yet it is his imaginativeness that distinguishes him as fully human. Moreover, Olympia’s artfulness as a singer gives her at least the appearance of human feeling, symbolically distinguishing her from her artistically unresponsive human rival, Klara.

Similarly, Luba Luft sings in the role of Pamina in Mozart’s The Magic Flute (1791), an opera loved by Rick Deckard. Indeed, the song Luft performs “always brought tears to Rick’s eyes” (97). As Luft performs, “he found himself surprised at the quality of her voice; it rated with that of the best, even that of notables in his collection of historic tapes” (99). While Deckard listens to her, believing that she is an android, the quality of her performance and her apparent appreciation of art force him to reexamine his assumptions about the supposed distinctions between human and android—to the point of doubting his own humanity. On the attraction he feels for Luft, Deckard reflects: “Empathy toward an artificial construct? he asked himself. Something that only pretends to be alive? But Luba Luft had seemed genuinely alive; it had not worn the aspect of simulation” (141; emphasis in original). As Patrick McCarthy writes, “Although Rick’s ability to see human characteristics in Luba Luft is partly due to his feelings of sexual attraction toward her, she is also a sympathetic character because her response to art and music demonstrates a depth of feeling not normally associated with androids” (345). Compared with the putatively human bounty hunter Phil Resch, who kills her, Luft does seem the more genuinely empathetic and alive of the two. Compared even to Deckard’s wife, Iran, the operatic Luft seems a more appropriate match for Dick’s art and music-loving protagonist. Luba Luft is very much Olympia’s daughter, just as Rick Deckard is a fictional descendant of Hoffmann’s Nathanael.—Ian F. Roberts, Missouri Western State University

WORKS CITED
Dick, Philip K. “The Android and the Human.” 1972. The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings. Ed. Lawrence Sutin. New York: Pantheon, 1995. 183-210.
─────. Lies, Inc. New York: Vintage, 2004.
─────. “Man, Android, and Machine.” 1976. The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings. Ed. Lawrence Sutin. New York: Pantheon, 1995. 211-32.
Ellis, John M. “Clara, Nathanael and the Narrator: Interpreting Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann.” German Quarterly 54.1 (1981): 1-18.
Hewett-Thayer, Harvey W. Hoffmann: Author of the Tales. New York: Octagon, 1971.
Hoffmann, E.T.A. “The Sandman.” 1814. E.T.A. Hoffmann: Tales. Trans. L.C. Kent and E.C. Knight. Ed. Victor Lange. New York: Continuum, 1982. 277-308.
McCarthy, Patrick A. “Do Androids Dream of Magic Flutes?” Paradoxa 5.13-14 (2000): 344-52.
Scher, Steven Paul. “E.T.A. Hoffmann.” Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 90. German Writers in the Age of Goethe, 1789-1832. Ed. James Hardin and Christophe E. Schweitzer. Detroit: Gale, 1989. 157-70.
Warrick, Patricia S. Mind in Motion: The Fiction of Philip K. Dick. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.

I.F. Clarke (1918-2009): Farewell to Captain Future. In a review of Clarke’s anthology British Future Fiction: 1700-1914, I wrote of him: “The erudite, articulate, and intrepid author of Voices Prophesying War and The Pattern of Expectation 1644-2001 is a reliable guide through the badlands of forgotten futuristic fiction. I.F. Clarke is our real-life Captain Future.” He amiably accepted this affectionately bestowed rank, or anyhow never complained about it in print. I only corresponded with him once, in the “Notes and Correspondence” pages of this journal. I never met him. But it was impossible not to love as well as admire the man reflected in his books. They were indeed brave works blazing pathways into what before had mostly been a daunting wilderness. For these achievements the Science Fiction Research Association bestowed on Clarke more solemn and substantial titles via a 1974 Pilgrim Award and a 1997 Pioneer Award. Strathclyde University named him Foundation Professor of English Studies.

Clarke’s books were major advances in knowledge about how the future has been envisioned. His Tale of the Future from the Beginning to the Present Day (3rd ed., 1978) is an annotated chronological list of prose tales of the future published in the United Kingdom between 1644 and 1976. It is invaluable in its domain. For investigations also reaching across the Channel and the Atlantic it is an ideal companion to Pierre Versins’s more expansive and frolicsome Encylopédie de l’utopie, des voyages extraordinaires et de la science fiction (1972; 2nd ed., 1984). In The Pattern of Expectation 1644-2001 (1979), Clarke outlines the ways in which hopes and fears about the future were articulated in various genres and many countries. Clarke’s special interest in war culminated in the 1992 second edition of Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars 1763-3749. Its companion, offering well-chosen samples, is Clarke’s 1995 anthology The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871-1914: Fictions of Future Warfare and of Battles Still-to-come. The eight volumes of his 2001 anthology British Future Fiction: 1700-1914 provide a generous sample (in faithful facsimile) of early novels that are otherwise very difficult to obtain and therefore too often neglected in favor of rounding up the usual suspects. For every kind of critical and cultural study of science fiction during the two centuries from which Clarke drew his samples, the pleasingly plump volumes in this collection ought to be required reading. Thanks to Clarke, its novels are now available without trekking to widely scattered libraries. In 2002 Clarke collaborated with his wife Margaret to publish The Last Man, a new English translation with critical apparatus of Jean-Baptiste François Xavier Cousin de Grainville’s enormously influential 1805 novel Le dernier homme. In 2004 they again collaborated to provide The World as It Shall Be, an English translation with introduction and notes of Émile Souvestre’s 1846 satiric gem Le Monde tel qu’il sera. Clarke’s long life has cast a shadow likely to be even longer. His books will endure as indispensable for serious students of futuristic fiction.—Paul K. Alkon

Forthcoming SF Events at UC-Riverside. My news item in the November 2009 issue detailing the devastating effects of the state’s budget cuts on UC-Riverside’s plans to develop a program in sf studies was undoubtedly as depressing to all of you in the larger scholarly community as the situation on the ground here has been to me. That said, we do plan to keep the torch burning with a number of major events in 2010 and early 2011.

UCR’s 32nd Annual Writers Week celebration, which will just have been held by the time this issue of SFS is in readers’ hands, is scheduled to run from 8-15 February 2010, including a colloquium on science fiction featuring Gregory Benford, Larry Niven, and Sheila Finch, moderated by me. This is believed to be the first sf-themed event in the history of Writers Week, California’s longest-running free literary festival, which in the past has hosted Allen Ginsberg, Wole Soyinka, N. Scott Momaday, Joyce Carol Oates, Amitav Ghosh, Robert Coover, Maxine Hong Kingston, and other luminaries.

The Second Annual Science Fiction Studies Symposium will be held on 27 May 2010, from 2:30-5:00 PM in the reading room of the Special Collections and Archives Department of the Rivera library, which houses the J. Lloyd Eaton Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Utopian Literature. (The proceedings from the first annual event can be found elsewhere in this issue.) The SFS Symposium brings together three major sf scholars to speak on a topic of theoretical importance to the field. The 2010 theme is “Animal Studies and Science Fiction,” and the participants will be Sherryl Vint, addressing “Animal Studies in the Era of Biopower; Joan Gordon, who will be “Talking (for, with) Dogs: Science Fiction Breaks the Species Barrier”; and Carol McGuirk, who will explore “The Animal Down-Deep: Cordwainer Smith’s Late Tales of the Underpeople.” At the reception following the event, we hope to be able to celebrate the launch of Professor Vint’s new book, Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal, due for publication in Spring 2010 by Liverpool University Press. If you’re interested in attending the Symposium, please contact me (at <rob.latham@ucr.edu>), since I can book accommodations at local hotels at a reduced UCR rate.

Finally, the 30th Annual Eaton Conference, on the topic of “Global Science Fiction,” will be held in Riverside on 10-13 February 2011. I, along with Melissa Conway, Head of Special Collections and Archives at UCR, will be chairing an international committee tasked with planning the event. Our Call for Papers may be found immediately below in Notes. We hope soon to be able to announce the winner of the Third J. Lloyd Eaton Award for Lifetime Achievement in Science Fiction—the first two having been bestowed on Ray Bradbury and Frederik Pohl. Keep an eye on the Conference website for updates (<http://eaton-collection. ucr.edu/TheEatonConference.htm>). The new Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards will also be debuting at the conference (see the Notes item further below for more information).The conference will be held, for the first time ever, at the historic Mission Inn hotel, a luxurious local landmark of truly epic dimensions (see their website at <http://missioninn.com/>).

These events, and others in the planning stages, will affirm UCR’s reputation as an international center of sf scholarship even amidst the draconian budget cuts. We hope you can join us for some of them!—Rob Latham, SFS

Call for Papers: 2011 Eaton “Global SF” Conference. This three-day conference—sponsored by the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Utopian Literature at the University of California, Riverside—will be held in Riverside, California, 11-13 February 2011 at the historic Mission Inn hotel. The conference proposes to examine the ways in which science fiction is a truly global phenomenon, crossing territorial, linguistic, and ideological boundaries in its imaginative engagement with the possibilities of the future. We are interested in papers that explore historical and contemporary sf in relation to processes of globalization, international social movements, universalist ideologies, multinational cultures, technoscientific networks, philosophies of cosmopolitanism, neo- and postcolonial politics, separatist and sovereignty movements, and more. We invite paper and panel proposals that focus on all forms of sf, including prose fiction, film, television, comics, and digital culture, and that address (but are not limited to) the following questions:

How is SF, as a form of multimedia production and a mode of visionary speculation, linked to the structures and world-views of an emerging global marketplace of ideas, commodities, and lifestyles?

How have SF cultures around the world evolved and adapted in relation to the processes of globalization, internationalization, and multinationality?

How do the legacies of colonialism and imperialism continue to inform global SF, and how have various local SF cultures negotiated their relationship with an Anglophone hegemony?

How have the relative paucity or poor quality of English-language translations served to obscure the fact that SF, thoughout its history, has always been a global phenomenon?

What has been the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of new forms of sociopolitical collectivity such as the European Union on the development of local SF cultures?

How has “hard SF” responded to a globalized world of corporate technoscience, multinational research ventures, and international scientific accords?

Has the growth of the Internet, the World Wide Web, and other information networks served to further “globalize” SF as a mode of production and a subcultural formation?

In what ways does SF foster outlooks that promote or critique the processes of globalization?

The keynote speaker will be Mike Davis, UCR Professor of Creative Writing and author of City of Quartz, The Ecology of Fear, Planet of Slums, and many other works exploring the linkages among social history, political economy, popular culture, and the processes of globalization. SF author guests will be announced as they are confirmed; see the conference website at <http://eaton-collection. ucr.edu/TheEatonConference.htm> for periodic updates. Abstracts of 500 words (for papers of 20-minutes in length) should be submitted by June 15, 2010 to Melissa Conway, Head of Special Collections and Archives, Rivera Library, UC-Riverside. Electronic submission is preferred via email at <melissa.conway@ucr.edu>.—Rob Latham, SFS
New Awards for SF&F Translation into English. At the World Fantasy Convention in San José in October 2009, new awards for fantastic literature were announced to reward and highlight works of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and related literature translated into English from other languages. Two awards will be presented: one for long-form literature (40,000 words and above) and the other for short forms. The awards will consist of a trophy and a cash prize. A copy of the trophy and an equal share of the cash prize will be given to both the author and the translator. The awards will seek out and recognize authors and translators who bring fresh new works created in other languages to the English-speaking world. For further details see the web site at <http://www.sfftawards.org/>.
Fantastic literature has a long and honorable tradition outside the English-speaking world. Jules Verne and Stanislaw Lem are acknowledged masters of science fiction, while writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić have created marvelous fantastic works. Some current authors, such as Andreas Eschbach, Maurice Dantec, and Andrzej Sapkowski, have had success in translation, but many more wait to be discovered. Our book stores are full of translated Japanese manga. China and Russia have huge local markets for science fiction.

The award is backed by a number of prominent academics, authors, and fans, in particular the staff at the University of California at Riverside (UCR), home of the Eaton Collection, one of the world’s largest collections of sf and fantasy literature. UCR Professor Rob Latham oberves that “the literature of the fantastic is an international phenomenon and has been since Hoffmann, Gogol, and Maupassant in the 19th century. Yet contemporary Anglo-American readers have only a sketchy sense of the global scope of science fiction and fantasy today. This award will take a big step towards the goal of closing that blind spot. UCR is proud to be associated with this initiative given the wide range of materials gathered in the Eaton Collection, which includes works published in well over a dozen languages.”

Professor Gary K. Wolfe, former dean and Professor of Humanities at Roosevelt University and a World Fantasy Award-winning critic, will serve as President of the SFFT Awards Board; he notes that “despite its ancient tradition and continuing popularity as an integral aspect of world literature, contemporary non-English language fantasy and science fiction has become all but invisible to those of us in the English-speaking world. I hope this award will not only recognize outstanding translations, but encourage editors and publishers to seek out more such translations in the future.

To Zoran Živković, who won a World Fantasy Award for The Library, a novel translated from Serbian, “it is a great idea. For many authors around the globe it will substantially improve their access to the biggest market for their work. At long last, the international fantasy community gets the equivalent of the Academy Award foreign film category.

I will run the SFFT Awards website and act as Awards Administrator. The first eligibility period will be the calendar year 2010 and the first awards will be presented in February 2011 at the Eaton SF conference in Riverside, California. We are in the process of setting up a California non-profit corporation to allow tax-deductible donations, and are also working to empanel a committee of five judges who will decide the winners. For further information, contact <info@ sfftawards.org> or Cheryl Morgan, Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Award, PO Box 64128, Sunnyvale, CA, 94088-4128 USA.—Cheryl Morgan

Announcing The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction. The editors of SFS are pleased and proud to announce the imminent publication of a project we have been working on for some years. The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction isdesigned as a historical survey of the genre and includes 52 works ranging from Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844) to Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation” (2008). The chronological table of contents follows; the anthology also includes a thematic table of contents that groups the stories into nine themes: Alien Encounters, Apocalypse and Post-Apocalypse, Artificial/ Posthuman Lifeforms, Computers and Virtual Reality, Evolution and Environment, Gender and Sexuality, Time Travel and Alternate History, Utopias/ Dystopias, and War and Conflict. A general introduction offers readers historical and theoretical guidance about sf as a genre, and each sf reading is introduced by a detailed headnote that provides an overview of the author’s life and characteristic concerns, along with other contextual information.

Table of Contents

Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844)

Jules Verne, excerpt from Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864)

H. G. Wells, “The Star” (1897)

E. M. Forster, “The Machine Stops” (1909)

Edmond Hamilton, “The Man Who Evolved” (1931)

Leslie F. Stone, “The Conquest of Gola” (1931)

C. L. Moore, “Shambleau” (1933)

Stanley Weinbaum, “A Martian Odyssey” (1934)

Isaac Asimov, “Reason” (1941)

Clifford Simak, “Desertion” (1944)

Theodore Sturgeon, “Thunder and Roses” (1947)

Judith Merril, “That Only a Mother” (1948)

Fritz Leiber, “Coming Attraction” (1950)

Ray Bradbury, “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950)

Arthur C. Clarke, “The Sentinel” (1951)

Robert Sheckley, “Specialist” (1953)

William Tenn, “The Liberation of Earth” (1953)

Alfred Bester, “Fondly Fahrenheit” (1954)

Avram Davidson, “The Golem” (1955)

Cordwainer Smith, “The Game of Rat and Dragon” (1955)

Robert Heinlein, “All You Zombies—” (1959)

J.G. Ballard, “The Cage of Sand” (1962)

R. A. Lafferty, “Slow Tuesday Night” (1965)

Harlan Ellison, “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” (1965)

Frederik Pohl, “Day Million” (1966)

Philip K. Dick, “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” (1966)

Samuel R. Delany, “Aye, and Gomorrah...” (1967)

Pamela Zoline, “The Heat Death of the Universe” (1967)

Robert Silverberg, “Passengers” (1968)

Brian Aldiss, “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” (1969)

Ursula K. Le Guin, “Nine Lives” (1969)

Frank Herbert, “Seed Stock” (1970)

Stanislaw Lem, “The Seventh Voyage” from The Star Diaries (1971)

Joanna Russ, “When It Changed” (1972)

James Tiptree, Jr., “And I Awoke and Found Me Here On the Cold Hill’s Side” (1973)

John Varley, “Air Raid” (1977)

Carol Emshwiller, “Abominable” (1980)

William Gibson, “Burning Chrome” (1982)

Octavia Butler, “Speech Sounds” (1983)

Nancy Kress, “Out of All Them Bright Stars” (1985)

Pat Cadigan, “Pretty Boy Crossover” (1986)

Kate Wilhelm, “Forever Yours, Anna” (1987)

Bruce Sterling, “We See Things Differently” (1989)

Misha Nogha, “Chippoke Na Gomi” (1989)

Eileen Gunn, “Computer Friendly” (1989)

John Kessel, “Invaders” (1990)

Gene Wolfe, “Useful Phrases” (1992)

Greg Egan, “Closer” (1992)

James Patrick Kelly, “Think Like a Dinosaur” (1995)

Geoff Ryman, “Everywhere” (1999)

Charles Stross, “Rogue Farm” (2003)

Ted Chiang, “Exhalation” (2008)

While we believe that the Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction will supply an abundance of reading pleasure for anyone interested in the sf genre, the collection is also intended for classroom use. Concurrent with the book’s publication, we will be launching a website to provide supplementary pedagogical materials, including study questions for each story, possible topics for essays and exams, sample syllabi based on the anthology’s contents, and links to other online resources. Wesleyan has announced the book for August 2010, so we believe that it will be available for use in classes beginning in the Fall. If you are scheduled to teach a course on sf during the coming year, we hope that you will consider adopting the book. The paperback edition will be priced at $39.95. —The Editors of SFS

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