About the Book

This book is about the tectonic assembly, and I suspect the geomorphology, of what is now the Western United States. In particular, it will use paleogeographic maps – in which the first author is an expert – to describe the sequence of processes. Besides great maps, the book contains a lot of lovely pictures of geologic landscapes.

This book will have some overlap with the book on Canadian geology we read recently – Four Billion Years and Counting – and also with John McPhee’s Assembling California, which we read a couple of years ago. We being me and CJS.

Taught by Prof. Sadia Khatri

This is an entirely-online asynchronous course. I am not quite sure what level of notes I’ll keep here yet. For starters, here is the course description.

By depicting invented worlds that differ in some way from the real world, fantastika pushes us to interrogate our present lives, politics, and social structures. […] Through diverse literary texts, and some films, we will explore imagined and extraordinary terrains, characters, cultures, ecologies, genders, languages, races, histories, and technologies. We will ask, what does the unreal reveal about our real lives?

Resources

Google Doc Syllabus is HERE
Google Drive Readings Folder is HERE

Required Texts

Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors ~400 pages
Miéville, China. The City & The City ~336 pages
Okorafor, Nnedi. Binti ~96 pages
Le Guin, Ursula. Left Hand of Darkness ~300 pages
Mondal, Mimi. His Footsteps, Through Darkness and Light ~27 pages

Category: Uncategorized

Ancient Landscapes of Western North America*, Blakely and Hanney

About the Book

SF&F Notes (ENGL 3022, Fall ’25, U MN)

Resources