Time Travel Portal

Epistolary fiction may have you thinking of Frankenstein and Dracula, but they were just the beginning. This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone builds on the epistolary tradition while creating a whole new experience with their epistolary science fiction/time travel/lgbtqia+ romance novella. We will explore the framing, narrative, metaphor, character, and linguistic choices of the authors in depth as we take our time dissecting this novella with fellow book lovers.

This Writer's Workshop will be for practicing the art of writing flash fiction, works that are of 500 or fewer words in length. This is a marvelous place for a new writer to begin as the size is not overwhelming. It is also a marvelous place for a seasoned writer to practice the craft of scene creation and characterization under severe creative restriction.

We will read examples of flash fiction, and provide feedback for one another on original pieces that we shall write over the length of the course. For this we will use the Collaborative Feedback Method that we use in all Space creative writing courses, a method which emphasizes kindness and curiosity while still providing rigorous and useful feedback to the writer.

Attn: All continua enthusiasts and stub residents, join us as we delve into the world of William Gibson's recent novel and Amazon Prime series, The Peripheral. A world of branch universes, nanobot assassinations, attenuated time travel and kleptocrats, all under the ever-watchful Periwinkle eyes of Detective Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer and the looming Jackpot. If you have read the novels already, this is a great chance to revisit them in light of the Amazon series for The Peripheral which began in 2022. If you have never read William Gibson, this is an opportunity to explore Gibson's particular flavor of fast-paced action, braided narratives, and provocative ideas.

Agency is the second novel of William Gibson's Jackpot Trilogy. Agency's timeline emerges in a branch universe where the 2016 election went otherwise and a somewhat salty AI assistant gets loose in the internet. Nanobot assassinations and attenuated time travel, surly barristas and tech billionaires, smart-ass AI and an elderly super-empowerd Detective Inspector Ainsley work to avoid the blades of the looming Jackpot. Although a sequel to The Peripheral, you need not have read that book to enjoy Agency. Please join us!

One of the most relevant novels you could read right now was written almost two centuries ago. Mary Shelley’s The Last Man asks what it means to be human while living in unprecedented times. This 1826 classic of apocalyptic science fiction considers the implications of a global pandemic, a rapidly changing environment, and the failures of political and social institutions. Part imaginative autobiography, part science fictional warning, and part ecocritical thought experiment, The Last Man forces us to examine our assumptions about our present and future.

In this module we will consider Mary Shelley’s novel in the context of her life, times, and intellectual history. We will also explore the afterlife of The Last Man in critical discussions of the ominously similar challenges we face in the 21st century. In the process, we will discuss the novel’s lasting meanings and contributions as pioneering work of speculative fiction.

The module will follow an 8-session structure as shown below:

Outline	8-Session Structure
Week 1	Lecture 1: The Last Man
	Discussion 1: Introduction and Volume 1
Week 2	Lecture 2: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
	Discussion 2: Volume 2
Week 3	Lecture 3: Inspirations and Ancestor Texts
	Discussion 3: Volume 3
Week 4	Lecture 4: Pandemic and Post-Apocalyptic Literature
	Discussion 4: Themes and Takeaways

J.R.R. Tolkien famously 'found' his legendarium, translating and editing The Red Book of Westmarch for his twentieth century readers. This is not the first time an author has 'forged' a 'lost' literary history as James Macpherson's 'Ossian' documents from the 1760s started a craze for forgeries. Thomas Chatterton's Rowley and Turgot manuscripts similarly fed off the Ossian controversy while questioning what it really meant to 'forge' a document.

The module will follow an 8-session structure as shown below:

Outline	8-Session Structure
Week 1	Lecture 1: The 1760s, the Age of Forgery
	Discussion 1: Which Red Book are we reading?
Week 2	Lecture 2: The Growth of Romantic Nationalism
	Discussion 2: The Book of Lost Tales: a mythology for which England?
Week 3	Lecture 3: Oral Traditions: Immortality and Youth
	Discussion 3: Vocalising Myth and History
Week 4	Lecture 4: Textual Traditions: Mortal Anxiety and Tangible History
	Discussion 4: Writing myth and history

The imagination and dreams are essential parts of J.R.R. Tolkien's world building which he explored across many stories from 'The Lord of the Rings' and 'On Fairy-stories' to 'The Notion Club Papers'. The same can be said of the Romantics who saw an important connection between the two. In works such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and 'Kubla Khan', Lord Byron's 'The Dream' and 'Darkness', and Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein', the imaginary and dream-like meet with awe-inspiring, melancholy or blood-chilling results.

Class Outline:

• Class 1: The Realms of (Childhood) Faery (60m)
• Class 2: Faery’s Enchantment (60m)
• Class 3: The Terror of the Night (60m)
• Class 4: The Past is an Imagined Dreamworld (90m)
• Class 5: Visions of the Apocalypse (60m)
• Class 6: Senses and Sensation (60m)
• Class 7: Glimpses, mere Fragments (90m)