My urban fantasy class has turned out to be quite small. While I had 25 enrolled last summer, enrollment peaked at 15 in early summer and was down to 11 by the time the class met for the first time. For various reasons, that number has now dwindled to 7. It’s beginning to feel like one of those Agatha Christie stories in which the characters are offed one by one. This lightens the grading load to say the least. The surviving class members are quite a good group, so I find myself with a seminar class in fantasy. One casualty was the result of plagiarism, which always pisses me off. I was hoping to get through the summer without one. They seem to be more common in recent years; the internet makes it so easy, I suppose. But the same internet makes it so easy to catch. Don’t these people Google? The favorite source of stolen words these days? Amazon.com reviews. I just had a plagiarism on Gaiman’s Anansi Boys that was cobbled together from 4 or 5 different reviews, some of which were really quite intelligent. Unfortunately, the authors weren’t enrolled in my class…

I’m still grading final exams, but the sf class ended yesterday. I thoroughly enjoyed teaching the class. I hope my students enjoyed it as well. When I polled them about the books we read, the results were interesting. There was a tie for the least favorite novel—Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World. However, when I asked what their favorite novel was, Murakami got the most votes of any single novel. So, safe to say, he evoked the strongest reaction and will remain on the syllabus. Ray B. be gone, however. I may return to Bester’s The Stars My Destination for the 50’s choice, though I welcome suggestions.

I’m often asked what I mean by Urban Fantasy and why I’ve chosen that tag for the course. We look at fantasy set in a modern setting as opposed to an idealized past or alternate world. “Contemporary fantasy” is an ambiguous term since it might refer to fantasy written by contemporary authors, regardless of the fantastic setting. “Dark fantasy” fits some of the works we’ll study, but not all of it’s “dark.” Anyway the Tolkienesque stuff rarely interests me even though I love the literature from which it sprang, medieval and renaissance romance. Maybe that’s because Marie de France and Ariosto are so damn sexy.

As I’ve mentioned here before, I teach summer school at VCU, teaching two 4.5 week classes back to back. These are a semester’s work crammed into less than a third the time, so they keep me busy. Hence my silence here. I start the class with the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers—the 1956 version—which IMO holds up incredibly well. None of this year’s students had ever seen it before. Today, we discuss Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, our first of five novels. It doesn’t hold up so well—too much bombast and speechifying. The waif who turns the fireman around credits her good sense to getting a good spanking when she needed it. In general the treatment of women leaves a lot to be desired, even for the 50’s. I’ll probably return to Bester in future.

As I have for the last few years, I will be teaching a couple of literature classes at Virginia Commonwealth University this summer. The first (June 11-July 11, Monday through Friday 10:30-12:20) will be Science Fiction. The second, (July 12-August 10, Monday through Friday 10:30-12:20) will be Urban Fantasy. They are short, intense classes, including both books and films. The Urban Fantasy class is near full, but there’s plenty of room in the Science Fiction class. These are 200 level courses. The only prerequisite is a year of freshman English.
The books and films for the Science Fiction class:

Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451
Philip K. Dick. Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?
Ursula K. Le Guin. The Lathe of Heaven
Haruki Murakami. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Robert Charles Wilson. Blind Lake
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
Dr. Strangelove
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
Blade Runner
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

The books and films for the Urban Fantasy Class:
Neil Gaiman. Anansi Boys
Sean Stewart. Perfect Circle
Kelly Link. Magic for Beginners
Jeffrey Ford. The Empire of Ice Cream
Haruki Murakami. Kafka on the Shore
Edward Scissorhands
The Sixth Sense
Being John Malkovich
Donnie Darko

I’m going to be teaching a science fiction class again this summer at Virginia Commonwealth University, so once again I’m revisiting my syllabus. The course is a chronological dash through sf books and films starting with The Stars My Destination and ending with Blind Lake. The students are intelligent college students, usually juniors and seniors from a variety of disciplines looking to fulfill a lit requirement, with varying degrees of familiarity with sf. I’ve always used Neuromancer as the “80’s book” because I love it, and it’s the 900-pound gorilla of the decade, but students consistently rate it dead last on the reading list, and I’ve vowed to replace it. My personal favorite of the Neuromancer trilogy is Count Zero, but I doubt they would like it any better. I’m considering Tanith Lee’s Silver Metal Lover or Greg Bear’s Blood Music. Any suggestions out there?