‘Exploring Science Fiction Course Outline’

January 2005

Hal Salive Science Fiction and Fantasy Collection, University of Otago Library Special Collections

Unpublished

Another extension to Salive’s collecting SF and Fantasy books was teaching. Over the years, he developed courses and offered them to groups such as the University of the Third Age (U3A). The five week ‘Exploring Science Fiction’ course was no doubt a distillation of all he knew about SF and Fantasy, and it ranged in content from the usual definitions and pre-1900 writers such as Sir Thomas More (Utopia) and Jules Verne (Voyage to the Centre of the Earth), to hard SF writers such as Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke, and movie and television phenomenon such as Star Trek and Sakaguchi’s The Spirits Within (2001). He also included rules for writing SF stories and the technologies and realities surrounding the worlds of SF and Fantasy.