Try This Fun Search

Head on over to the SUNY Fredonia online library catalog and type in "science fiction." We're an official repository of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, so we get dozens if not hundreds of new novels a year. The collection's basically taken over the 3rd floor of Reed Library. Check it out when you're in town!

Dan Simmons Hates Hamilton College

Or at least it appears that way, as the following line from Ilium

I feel like I'm in the crucible of oral exams at Hamilton College, my undergraduate alma mater. (528)

gets contradicted repeatedly in Olympos, where the character in question's B.A. is from Wabash.

For shame, Mr. Simmons, for shame!

Gibson's Chiba, My Chiba: On the Image of Japan in U.S. Cyberpunk

Reading the first chapter of William Gibson's Neuromancer made me nostalgic for Chiba. Not the Chiba of Night City and Ninsei--a kind of "historical park" to the origins of the Yakuza, a "deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself" (11)--but the Chiba of my wife's parents, of the 5-square-block area around their home my children and I know as well as anywhere we've ever been. The Chiba of the Don Quixote department store, the Tsutaya video store, the Book-Off secondhand store, the grocery stores and the combinis, the play parks and the elementary schools; the Chiba that's connected to the downtown bus and train station/shopping district by a ten-minute bus ride or half-hour walk, that's even closer to the Yamada Denki discount electronics store and the public library and a little farther from the discount shoe store--and that's even a long walk from the shrine we go to for New Year's and the cemetery we visit to clean the gravestone of my wife's grandmother, our older daughter's namesake. While it's true that there are areas still basically controlled by the Yakuza, and that the relationship between Chiba and Tokyo might well be analogized to the contrasting images of Jersey City and New York City, I don't need the excellent analysis by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun in Control and Freedom of the related orientalisms of Neuromancer and Ghost in the Shell to convince me that Gibson's Chiba--and his Japan in general--is quite significantly distorted from its reality in the 1980s, much less today.

In a sense, though, I'm not just nostalgic for the real Chiba, but also for the image I got of it from Neuromancer, many years before I ever visited Japan. Nostalia is weird.

Across the Pond

As we move from Stewart and Bradbury to Gibson this weekend, it's probably a good thing to reiterate the U.S.-centricity of my course and attempt to contextualize it with this review essay from The Times Literary Supplement and its focus on British sf. It picks up on and runs with many of the central concerns of the opening of the course.... So reading this and thinking about your experience in the course so far, what do you see as the strengths and limits of my design?

Welcome to sf@SF

sf@SF is starting off as a course blog for the students in my spring 2008 version of ENGL 216 Science Fiction, but it will eventually include anyone affiliated with SUNY Fredonia who wants to post their writing on science fiction here. It replaces sf@SF 1.0, which was a neat experiment, but too much work for the students in my spring and summer 2005 science fiction courses who chose to design their own web sites on a few of the authors we read. This semester, students have the chance to become co-authors of this blog and post here instead of, or in addition to, participating in the discussion board of our course ANGEL space. And, after each student team has lead a discussion on the author and novel of their choice, I'll be posting essays from each team member that use his or her research and teaching as a springboard for further reflection.