Dynamic Subspace

Tag: YASFT

  • Ideas for Expanding Yet Another Science Fiction Textbook (YASFT)

    isometric view of an rpg dungeon with creatures moving around and an ethereal green flame in the background
    Isometric RPG dungeon image created with Stable Diffusion.

    Yesterday, one of my top students visited my virtual office hours on Zoom to talk about their research paper. During our conversation, he made impassioned arguments that I add chapters on Video Games and Table Top Gaming to Yet Another Science Fiction Textbook (YASFT), the OER textbook that I published earlier this year and am teaching with for the first time this semester. He’s right–it does need coverage of those topics not just for completeness but also because it’s how many students make a deeper connection to the genre (with television and film often being an introduction). It’s something that I plan to work on when I get a chance.

  • Where to Search for Open Educational Resources (OER)

    a ulysses butterfly folded origami style out of paper, resting on a book, in a wooded area. Image created with Stable Diffusion.

    The next academic year is just around the corner, so I wanted to give a shout out for the open educational resource (OER) that I published earlier this year, Yet Another Science Fiction Textbook (YASFT), an over 60,000 word textbook on the history of SF literature that includes a syllabus, video lectures, and more.

    And, if you’re an educator needing open and free teaching materials and textbooks, here are some useful resources where you can find OERs:

  • Joan Slonczewski Added to Yet Another Science Fiction Textbook (YASFT)

    An image of a woman walking through a tunnel toward an ocean's beach and a sky filled with stars inspired by Joan Slonczewski's novel A Door Into Ocean. Created with Stable Diffusion.

    I added a whole new section on the Hard SF writer Joan Slonczewski (they/them/theirs) to the Feminist SF chapter of the OER Yet Another Science Fiction Textbook (YASFT). It gives students an overview of their background as a scientist, writer, and Quaker, and it discusses three representative novels from their oeuvre: A Door Into Ocean (1986), Brain Plague (2000), and The Highest Frontier (2011). Like the Afrofuturism chapter, I brought in more cited, critical analysis of Slonczewski’s writing, which is parenthetically cited with a full citation instead of using a works cited list or footnotes.

    Slonczewski’s A Door Into Ocean was the inspiration for the image above that I created using Stable Diffusion. It took the better part of a day to create the basic structure of the image, then there was inpainting of specific details such as the woman’s footprints in the sand, and finally, feeding the inpainted image back into SD’s controlnet to produce the final image.