Writing World Sci Fi and Fantasy

Catalog description

This discussion-driven, research-intensive seminar approaches science fiction and fantasy as world literature: not simply genres that “travel,” but forms continually remade through translation, colonial and postcolonial histories, diaspora, indigenous sovereignty, and uneven technological modernities. As a critical-creative workshop in global speculative writing, the course pairs close reading with sustained craft practice. We will read SF/F from multiple regions and traditions, often in translation, not only to interpret what these texts argue and imagine, but to study how they are built: voice, narrative architecture, worldbuilding, mythmaking, genre-bending, and the ethical pressures that arise when writing across cultures, histories, and languages. Each primary text functions as a mentor text. In seminar discussion we will identify its craft moves (how it handles time, wonder, bureaucracy, monsters, intimacy, technology, spirits, empire, climate, and diaspora) then students will test those strategies through original creative work: short stories, scenes, flash fictions, speculative poetry, paratext experiments (“translated from…”), and world dossiers. The course treats “world SF/F” as a set of practices and pathways (circulation, translation, and local literary lineages) and asks what it means to write speculative work that is ambitious, responsible, and formally inventive in a global field. Students will complete a revised final portfolio accompanied by a critical artist’s statement situating their work within the course’s literary and theoretical conversations.