New OER Launched: Yet Another Science Fiction Textbook (YASFT)

Woman astronaut wearing an exosuit is reading a book in a futuristic library. A tall alien male is standing in the background selecting a book off the shelf. Image created with Stable Diffusion.

I’m very happy to announce the launch of a new open educational resource (OER) that I’ve been working on for awhile!

It’s called Yet Another Science Fiction Textbook (YASFT). It’s over 60,000 words and includes additional resources that can be helpful for readers, students, and instructors.

YASFT is released under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Creative Commons License. It’s freely available to be read as it is. However, if anyone would like to use it in another way, there are licensing terms that must be followed: “This license requires that reusers give credit to the creator. It allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, for noncommercial purposes only. If others modify or adapt the material, they must license the modified material under identical terms.”

You can find YASFT under the Teaching menu above or directly here.

Its abstract and table of contents are included below.

Abstract

Yet Another Science Fiction Textbook (YASFT) is an open educational resource or OER, meaning it is freely available for anyone to use and learn with. It provides a chronological history of Science Fiction (SF) with an emphasis on literature and film, and it includes other useful resources, such as a glossary of terms, an extensive list of SF definitions, additional resources, a syllabus with hyperlinked readings available online, and video lectures. It tells a story, but not the only story, about SF history. It’s also an experiment in using generative artificial intelligence (AI) to assist with editing a large body of text, in this case over 60,000 words.

Table of Contents

    Front Matter
        What is YASFT?
        Who made YASFT?
        Why was YASFT made?
        Why is it called YASFT?
        How can YASFT be used?
        How was YASFT made?
        Acknowledgements
    Preface
    Origins of Science Fiction
        Early Fantastic Stories
        Scientific Revolution
        Age of Enlightenment
        Romanticism
        The Gothic
    Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
        Science-Saturated Novel
        Victor Frankenstein’s Hubris
        Critique of the Age of Enlightenment
        Tabula Rasa
    Proto-SF
        Historical Context
        Edgar Allan Poe
        Nathaniel Hawthorne
        Jules Verne
        H. G. Wells
        E. M. Forster
    Pulp SF
        Historical Context
        Overview of Pulp SF
        Hugo Gernsback
        E. E. “Doc” Smith
        C. L. Moore
        Edgar Rice Burroughs
        H. P. Lovecraft
    SF Film Serials of the 1930s and 1940s
        Buck Rogers
        Flash Gordon
    Golden Age SF
        Historical Context
        Overview of Golden Age SF
        John W. Campbell, Jr.
        Isaac Asimov
        Ray Bradbury
        Robert A. Heinlein
        Frank Herbert
        Tom Godwin
    SF Film Through the 1950s
        Film vs. Literature
        Early SF Film
        1950s SF Film Boom
        Forbidden Planet
    New Wave SF
        Historical Context
        Overview of New Wave SF
        J.G. Ballard
        Harlan Ellison
        Philip K. Dick
        Samuel R. Delany
    Star Trek
        “The City on the Edge of Forever”
    Feminist SF
        Historical Context
        Beginnings of Feminist SF
        Definitions of Feminist SF
        Joanna Russ
        Marge Piercy
        Pamela Zoline
        James Tiptree, Jr.
        Ursula K. Le Guin
        Octavia E. Butler
    Afrofuturism
        Steven Barnes
        Tananarive Due
        Nalo Hopkinson
        Nnedi Okorafor
    Cyberpunk
        Historical Context
        Coining the Cyberpunk Term
        Cyberpunk Characteristics
        William Gibson
            Sprawl Trilogy and Stories
            Hermes 2000 and Floppy Disk eBooks
            The X-Files, “Kill Switch”
        Bruce Sterling
        Pat Cadigan
    Contemporary Science Fiction
        Historical Context
        Ted Chiang
        N. K. Jemisin
        Cory Doctorow
        Charlie Jane Anders
        Martha Wells
        Mary Robinette Kowal
        Ken Liu
        R. F. Kuang
    SF Film from 1960 Onward
        1960s
        1970s
        1980s
        1990s
        2000s
        2010s
    Global Perspective: Taiwanese SF
        Brief Taiwanese History
        Taiwanese SF Overview
        Taiwanese Fandom
        Cultural Comparisons
        Issues with Translation
    How to Keep Up With Science Fiction
    Appendices
        Appendix 1: Glossary of Science Fiction Terms
        Appendix 2: Chronological List of SF Definitions of Science Fiction with MLA Citations
        Appendix 3: Further Reading
            Textbooks
            Readers
            Teaching
            Online Research
        Appendix 4: Sample Syllabus with Hyperlinked Readings
        Appendix 5: Lecture Videos
        Appendix 6: Version History

Almost Done With a Sabbatical Side Project

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These past two weeks, I’ve been working on a sabbatical side project. I put my primary research project on hold so that I could think about it some more before proceeding. In the meantime, I’m using generative AI to help accelerate my work on an open educational resource (OER) focused on Science Fiction (SF) that I plan to launch soon. The writing is done on the project. What I am doing now is using an large language model (LLM) that I’m running on my desktop workstation to help me with editing. I think the end product will be pretty cool, and it will be something anyone is free to use after it’s launched. Stay tuned!

DynamicSubspace.net in Review, 2023

One of my personal goals for my sabbatical has been to revitalize dynamicsubspace.net after years of declining viewership. I was happy to see that the pendulum swung back to an increase rising from 18,099 views in 2022 to 19,455 views in 2023.

Looking further back, you can see in the chart above that my site’s views jumped off the proverbial cliff at the beginning of 2013 . There were a few reasons for this. First, I started my first professional employment as a Brittain Fellow at Georgia Tech, which took away time from blogging due to more time spent prepping, teaching, researching, and providing service to the writing program. Second, I deleted most of my social media accounts, which I had been using to publicize my posts automatically and had in turn led many returning visitors to the site. Third, Google changed how it ranked sites and search results (updates to the Panda algorithm and then the upgrade to Hummingbird), which probably had a precipitously negative effect on how many visitors found posts on my site through search.

Some of the things that I’ve been doing to achieve that goal has involved setting a publishing schedule of one new post per day Monday through Friday (resulting in my writing over 53k words across 125 new posts this year), refocusing on sharing a combination of how-to and research-based posts, building out and continuously updating a new bibliography page based on my research on teaching about/with generative AI, and analyzing the site using Google Search Console and making suggested changes (i.e., removing posts with dead links and video).

I did try using some social media to surface my work to new audiences by joining and contributing to online communities. I had the most success with LinkedIn, which I continue to use daily. I had less success with Mastodon, which felt like shouting into the void and yielded no measurable bump to shared content and few genuine connections. I had the least success with Reddit due to frustration with armchair experts and down votes when I pointed out content theft and fake posts in some of the communities I had joined. Always curating my online footprint, I deleted the Mastodon and Reddit accounts.

I plan to keep working on the site in this manner throughout 2024. I hope the writing, images, and video that I share might be interesting and informative to folks who happen to pass by. Of course, you can drop me a line to let me know if you found something useful–my email address is in the info widget to the right.

New Page Showcasing Text and Image Generating Programs Predating Contemporary Artificial Intelligence (AI)

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Since I’ve been writing about different kinds of software that generate text and images without using modern artificial intelligence (AI), I wanted to thread them together on their own page under the Research heading in the site menu above and available here.

Currently, the page collects together my posts about image generating software KPT Bryce and Evolvotron, and text-generating software Electric Poet, Kant Generator Pro, Mac Prose, and McPoet 5.1. I will update that page with additional links as I publish posts about other pre-AI generative software.

November 2023 Update on the Generative AI and Pedagogy Bibliography Page

A holographic projection of an AI emerges from the portal. Image generated with Stable Diffusion XL.

Since my last update in September, I’ve continued adding MLA-formatted book and article entries to the Generative AI and Pedagogy Bibliography page each week as I come across them.

There are now 434 bibliographic entries–an addition of 52 new entries. The online resource list at the bottom of the page is now up to 56 links–an increase of only one.

Most of the new bibliographic entries are in the pedagogy, generative text, background, and textbook sections, but there are some interesting titles that I added to the other AI application sections.

Following the explosion of new titles on artificial intelligence earlier this year, the rate of new publications have slowed. I suspect that some titles were rushed out to take advantage of the hype and now new titles are being released at normal publication rates. But, I also suspect that the pipeline is in the process of rebuilding, perhaps with even more titles than were in the first wave.

As I’ve written before, the list isn’t exhaustive. I include titles that I find interesting through my research and study of generative AI. Nevertheless, I hope that it might be useful to folks who find it one way or another.