Teaching Notes for You On Mars: Failed Sci-Fi Stories:
Use in the classroom to discuss: sci-fi; genre play and formation; altered worlds; brevity; hopeful dystopia; love in times of change; partnership; survival and extinction events; climate change; personal apocalypses; perpetual darkness; semi-natural spaces; characters in uncanny environments; characters in artificial environments; technological (mis)communication; earnest explorations of the feminine; gender (roles); the formation and organization of a story collection; humor; imagination; kisses.
Pairs well with Last Days of the Microsaurs, A Brief Encyclopedia of Modern Magic, Weird Weeks.
You on Mars: Failed Sci-Fi Stories by Jennifer A. Howard
52 pages. Perfect bound.
How can an engineer codify failure? Is the answer available in a prototype? Must one always act on checklists? Or are there other means? Jennifer A. Howard’s flash fiction collection You on Mars: Failed Sci-Fi Stories flips the usual genre gimmicks—alien encounters, viral outbreaks, time travel plots—to expose how human delicacy and care proliferate in moments of failure and loss. Come into the engine room. Look up into the stars. Kiss your husband. See how love slips across spacetime? Ask yourself: Is this the same as it ever was? Decide what will you do when it is not.