Fantasy and Science Fiction

OMG! Literally :) This should have been a October post. Not even October, it should have been in September. But November it is.


Fantasy and Science Fiction - A course on coursera taught by Prof. Eric Rabkin.
I like the way Eric describes the nature of fantastic - "...the diametric, diachronic reversal of the ground rules of the narrative world."  
After reading Harry Potter series, LOTR and more recently GRRM, i knew that i loved fantasy genre. After all, i am a true escapist at heart. (And why not in this real world.... more on this later). But it was not any kind of fantasy that i like. Political drama like GRRM with good prose is always a favorite. I reread LOTR last December just to remember how good it was. I liked HP series never for its prose but how the jigsaw puzzle unfolded and connected everything in the end. 
According to GRRM,  people don't like fantasy because of magic spells or dragons.   In LOTR, when there was war, Gandalf was not fighting with spells and curses, he had a sword in his hand. My thesis here is that (a) fantasy shakes the ground rules of our world and that is what makes it so appealing and (b) It is not the props that matter, it is the interaction between reality and those props.

(As a sidenote, herein lies why the battle scenes in Harry Potter movies do not work because there is no excitement in watching two people fighting with muted breaths and words with a broken stick on their hands).

As far as Science Fiction goes, the genre never appealed to me. I have never really enjoyed Star Wars. I read Ender's game last year and found it to be too young adult-ish (read childish). Battlestar Gallactica was impressive but again not due to its SF elements but because of its political drama. I believe that the whole SF genre is way more popular in US that India because of the cultural context that they grew in.  But, it is not to say that i am not amazed by SF. I truly believe that the power of science as a fantasy tool has endless possibilities but just that  before this course, i had not come across any good SF writing. 

I also believe that mythology is  an extension of fantasy. Having read, and thoroughly enjoyed, Mahabharatha and Illiad before,  i didn't see them as religious texts but as one of the best writings of fantasy ever possible.

So, my motives for taking this course was to know more about great writings in this genre. The course description had Dracula and Frankenstein. I have never been a fan of horror genre either, so i thought it was a good way of getting into its roots as well. It was to be a demanding course - 10 novels in 10 weeks. The course outline is copied below - 


Grimm — Children's and Household Tales
Carroll — Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
Stoker — Dracula
Shelley — Frankenstein
Hawthorne & Poe — Stories and Poems
Wells — The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, "The Country of the Blind," "The Star"
Burroughs & Gilman — A Princess of Mars & Herland
Bradbury — The Martian Chronicles
LeGuin — The Left Hand of Darkness
Doctorow — Little Brother

Off the above, i didn't get time to read Poe. I couldn't finish Island of Dr. Moreau and i read the wrong Bradbury (idiotic mistake) - I read a graphic novel adaptation of The Martian Chronicles instead of the actual book.

The course is designed intelligently. Not only it goes from fairy tales to horror to SF to modern fantasy, the writings selected are also in chronological order.  This shows how the genre has evolved over time. The books chosen are the ones that has helped in shaping the genre. I especially enjoyed the fact that i read Dracula and Frankenstein back to back.

Among the list, the ones that i disliked the most was Burrough's A Princess of Mars. I found it to be too YA and lacking completely in prose. Followed by Alice's Adventures in Wonderland which outside of the wordplay (which is excellent), i found it falling abysmally  short in plot and story elements.  My favorite were Stoker's Dracula (oh how much i enjoyed reading it) and Wells' stories. I liked how Wells deconstructs the grandeur perception of super-hero abilities.  The one that surprised me the most was Gilman's Herland. I had never read a utopian novel and to read a feminist utopian novel was simply a treat. It was a very refreshing read and it was the one that broke most of the ground rules.  Doctorow's Little Brother was the most "masala" book of the lot, it is an ideal summer beach reading. But as Eric explains in his lecture, it is not at all an easy task to write in this manner. The craft is much more appreciated after attending the lectures.


We had to write a small essay on every book offering an insight about the book which will be useful for others. It was a good creative exercise to do so. Reading peer responses was also quite informative. Coursera has done a good job in creating a platform to do so. The discussion forums were too noisy but some of the popular posts were a delight to read.