I’m planning to keep a running list here of things I’d teach in an ideal world in which this class ran for a year or two instead of six weeks.  All of these things are worth checking out, for one reason or another.

• Jorge Luis Borges – “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (wikipedia)
• along the same lines as Babel:  Syriana, Traffic, Magnolia, Contagion, and other such hyperlink cinema
• to think about metafiction and the differences in scale and scope between “fictional” worlds and “real worlds,” the utterly brilliant film Synecdoche, New York (this was one of the last things cut from the syllabus, and cutting it absolutely broke my heart)
• Jeff Lemire’s Essex County, which was the book we were originally doing during the first week of class before the book-ordering snafu – a really wonderful construction of a local world from multiple narratives, a la Babel but on a much, much smaller scale
• Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, which I originally considered doing during psychological/headspace worlds week but replaced with Girl, Interrupted
• Sesshu Foster’s Atomik Aztex, which is one of the most brilliant and baffling novels I can remember reading – a weird, dizzying blending of an alternate history in which the Aztecs are the hegemonic power with an alternate reality to that alternate reality (which basically looks like our reality), specifically the reality of immigrant workers working in a meat-packing plant in Los Angeles
• Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle, an alternate history in which the Axis Powers won World War II, but the reality in which the Allies won bleeds through in unpredictable moments
• Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan, one of the funniest novels about globalization I’ve read
• William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, two of the smartest novels I can think of about what’s happened to worldness in the last decade or so (also about such weird, vaguely science-fictional things as locative art, coolhunting, and the semiotics of branding and logos)
• Another Earth, a quiet little film with a science-fictional premise (a duplicate Earth appears, complete with duplicates of analogues to all of our Earth’s inhabitants) but a very non-science-fictional treatment of it, suggests interesting things about the uniqueness of worlds and the lives within them
• Myst, a fantastic game from the early ’90s in which certain kinds of books are quite literally machines for the creation of worlds (the protagonist enters one such mysterious world this way, where he has to make his way through a series of puzzles that eventually lead to evidence of more book-worlds)
• Civilization, a turn-based strategy game in which one builds a civilization from the ground up, starting in prehistory and (if all goes well) working one’s way up to space flight, managing economic, cultural, military, and scientific resources and decision-making – another crucial game for thinking about worldness and the history of the world as a whole
• Charles Stross’s Halting State, which thinks about the ways in which virtual worlds aren’t separate from the real world but are in fact a crucial aspect of it
• Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, which I haven’t read yet but which sounds great for a class like this – about a post-global-recession world in which a giant MMO/virtual world game has effectively replaced “the real world” as the place in which people live their lives
• Teju Cole’s Open City – other than Essex County, the last book to get cut from the syllabus – like Joyce’s Dubliners, kind of, but with a Nigerian immigrant traversing New York City
• World of Warcraft – if we weren’t doing The Guild (which is about players of a similar sort of game), I’d be having you play a bit of WoW, which seems to have lost much of its cachet at this point but which is still a very notable virtual/game world and representative of the way many such worlds function
• and as a point of contrast, Second Life, which is a non-game virtual world (and which I think might be interesting in theory but is considerably less so in practice—like most of the rest of the internet, by now it’s basically become yet another repository for advertising and porn)
• The Sims – another useful game for thinking about worldness and simulation
• originally I wanted to have a day on which we played board-type games like checkers, chess, othello, mancala, and so on and thought about the ways in which even incredibly simple, seemingly non-representational games like these generate finite worlds (and which might help us think about how more complicated games generate worldness, not only through narrative but through rules, strategies, and logics)
• Maureen McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang, which imagines a future dominated culturally and economically by Chinese communism – as wikipedia says, “The novel is slightly unusual for science fiction in that none of the characters cause any significant change in the world around them; nor does it use any standard science fiction tropes”
• James Tiptree, Jr.’s “The Screwfly Solution” (wikipedia), which is one of the most frightening stories I can ever remember reading and which would have gone very well in our end of the world week if there’d been any more room
• Edward P. Jones’s The Known World – won the Pulitzer in 2004; really phenomenal novel about (among other things) black slaveowners in the antebellum South, very much engaged (if you couldn’t tell by the title) with worldness as a mode of thinking and especially as potentially a very constricting mode of thinking