The sessions grew directly from the students\u2019 reading. They had already studied Isaac Asimov\u2019s \u201cRunaround,\u201d the 1942 short story that introduced the Three Laws of Robotics, and Brian W. Aldiss\u2019s \u201cSupertoys Last All Summer Long.\u201d Both ask what separates a person from an artificial being. The paperbacks gave students another set of texts to read: the images, typefaces, colors, formats, and marketing choices that publishers placed around the stories.<\/p>\n
Lucas prepared students for the visit through class discussion and posts on her course website, including \u201cENG 1103: Covering Sci-Fi\u201d<\/a>. Archives & Special Collections selected seventeen books and organized them into four thematic stations. Together, the course readings, physical books, station placards, observation exercise, and follow-up group work created a bridge from close looking to literary analysis.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n A Collection Built for Discovery<\/strong><\/p>\n The books came from HPU Libraries\u2019 Isaac Asimov Collection<\/a>, assembled and donated by Dr. John L. Hubisz, a retired physics professor who taught at North Carolina State University. When the library featured the collection in 2016, it included 1,343 items representing 524 titles. These included books written or edited by Asimov, science fiction magazines, critical studies, biographical works, and memorabilia.<\/p>\n The breadth of the collection made it possible to place Asimov beside writers such as Aldiss, Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, Larry Niven, Joe Haldeman, Alfred Bester, and John Wyndham. This context matters in that rather than presenting a single author\u2019s work in isolation, the sessions invited students to compare how different artists and publishers visualized artificial intelligence, cosmic scale, unfamiliar environments, warfare, aging, and transformation across several decades of paperback design.<\/p>\n Mass-market paperbacks may not look like conventional rare books, but that is part of their instructional value. Designed to circulate and compete for attention, their compact size, inexpensive paper, visible wear, vivid art, and assertive typography preserve evidence of how science fiction reached a broad public. In person, each becomes a complete historical object, not simply a text or a flat digital image.<\/p>\n Four Ways to Read a Cover<\/strong><\/p>\n The first station, Robots, Artificial Persons, and Unstable Realities<\/strong>, connected most directly with \u201cRunaround.\u201d A 1970 Fawcett Crest edition of I, Robot<\/em>, with art by John Berkey, presented a rounded, visibly mechanical robot. Beside it, I, Robot: The Illustrated Screenplay<\/em>, by Harlan Ellison and Asimov, offered Mark Zug\u2019s more humanoid interpretation. Students could compare two approaches to artificial life, as well as prose fiction with an unproduced cinematic adaptation.<\/p>\n Four Philip K. Dick paperbacks complicated the comparison. John Schoenherr\u2019s We Can Build You<\/em> split a human-looking body between flesh and machinery, while Bob Pepper\u2019s repeated faces and tangled imagery for The Simulacra<\/em> suggested fractured identity and an unstable reality. Charles Mikolaycak\u2019s The Variable Man and Other Stories<\/em> surrounded a recognizably human figure with wires, geometric forms, and a mysterious orb, blending technological and almost mystical imagery. Gene Szafran\u2019s Ubik<\/em> transformed an ordinary consumer product into something unsettling. Together, the covers invited students to consider whether technology appeared helpful, threatening, commercial, familiar, or unknowable, and how those visual choices shaped expectations about identity, reality, and human control.<\/p>\n The second station, Aldiss, Environment, and Author Branding<\/strong>, brought together three books by the author of \u201cSupertoys Last All Summer Long.\u201d Dean Ellis\u2019s Starship<\/em>, originally published as Non-Stop<\/em>, emphasized jungle vegetation and survival while only hinting at the generation ship that contains the story. Vincent Di Fate\u2019s Galaxies Like Grains of Sand<\/em> used spacecraft and planets to announce cosmic science fiction. Joe Bergeron\u2019s Starswarm<\/em> offered another identity through an unfamiliar landscape and monumental forms.<\/p>\n Placed side by side, the books showed that an author\u2019s public identity is partly constructed by publishers and artists. Students considered what kind of story each cover promised, including adventure, danger, social speculation, or cosmic wonder, and which seemed most compatible with their experience of \u201cSupertoys.\u201d<\/p>\n At the third station, Scale, Megastructures, and Imagined Futures<\/strong>, books by Larry Niven and Arthur C. Clarke demonstrated how cover artists make enormous or unfamiliar ideas visually legible. Dean Ellis\u2019s Ringworld<\/em> translated an artificial world of almost unimaginable size into a composition a paperback browser could grasp, with human figures dwarfed by the vast engineered structure. His cover for Niven\u2019s Protector<\/em> created scale differently, placing small figures within a strange landscape and emphasizing environment and biological mystery rather than machinery. Ellis\u2019s Childhood\u2019s End<\/em> placed an immense spacecraft over a recognizable modern city, establishing an immediate imbalance between human and alien power.<\/p>\n Stanislaw Fernandes\u2019s Reach for Tomorrow<\/em> presented the future through spacecraft, orbital structures, and engineering, suggesting a world made navigable through technological achievement. By contrast, Richard M. Powers\u2019s The City and the Stars<\/em> created futurity through abstract architecture, luminous color, and vertical scale rather than familiar machines. Its solitary human figure appeared almost insignificant beside the towering city.<\/p>\n Students considered the relative sizes of people, cities, spacecraft, planets, and constructed environments. Which cover made humanity appear most powerful? Which made people seem smallest or most vulnerable? Did these imagined futures appear inviting, threatening, or unknowable? Could a world look technologically advanced without showing a recognizable robot or spacecraft?<\/p>\n The final station, Bodies, Time, War, and Transformation<\/strong>, shifted attention to the human figure. Murray Tinkelman\u2019s The Forever War<\/em> combined a space-suited soldier with clocklike imagery, turning war, technology, and time dilation into one visual argument. Ken Kelly\u2019s The Stars My Destination<\/em> used a tumbling body to convey motion and transformation. Paul Giovanopoulos\u2019s Trouble with Lichen<\/em> presented biological speculation through faces that made aging and anti-aging immediately visible.<\/p>\n Together, these books demonstrated that science fiction is not defined by one visual vocabulary. A cover can communicate the genre through a body, a landscape, a city, a household product, or a subtle disruption of the familiar.<\/p>\n From Looking to Making an Argument<\/strong><\/p>\n The books were not simply placed on display. At each station, students examined the covers closely and recorded observations about prominent features, patterns, and connections to \u201cRunaround\u201d and \u201cSupertoys Last All Summer Long.\u201d They considered color, composition, typography, bodies, machines, movement, setting, and scale, then moved to the next group of books and repeated the process.<\/p>\n After the individual exercise, students worked together to turn their observations into possible discussion points and analytical questions. Their group assignment asked them to connect the visual ideas on the covers with the futures imagined by Asimov and Aldiss. It also challenged them to develop possible prompts for an upcoming analytical paper, including one that would require close examination of \u201cRunaround\u201d alongside two or more covers for I, Robot<\/em>.<\/p>\n That progression is central to object-based learning. Students began by noticing concrete details, compared interpretations with classmates, connected visual evidence to assigned texts, and then shaped those connections into questions and claims. Lucas later noted that the sessions gave students context for their study of Asimov and Aldiss, and that their recorded observations sparked ideas for both class discussion and their forthcoming analyses.<\/p>\n The physical books added something that reproductions alone could not. Students could see the covers at their intended scale, compare editions directly, turn from cover to interior illustration, and notice the paper, wear, typography, and compact mass-market format. Those material details help reconstruct the experience of the books\u2019 original readers and reveal publishing choices that can disappear when a cover is reduced to an isolated image on a screen.<\/p>\n Bring Archives & Special Collections into Your Course<\/strong><\/p>\n This collaboration is one example of how Archives & Special Collections can support teaching throughout the University. Our collections can contribute to courses in literature, history, communication, art and design, education, the sciences, and many other fields. A session might ask students to analyze a book\u2019s binding, paper, typography, illustration, annotations, or evidence of ownership. It might use photographs, yearbooks, student newspapers, posters, publications, and University records to explore HPU history and campus culture. Other possibilities include zines and self-publishing, preservation and material evidence, digital projects, exhibits, and original research assignments.<\/p>\n As outlined on our Teaching with Archives & Special Collections<\/a> page, we work with faculty to identify materials connected to course themes and to design visits and activities around specific learning goals. Sessions do not need to begin with a particular rare book or archival collection. They can begin with a question, a theme, an assignment, or even a skill that an instructor wants students to practice. From there, we can help locate relevant materials and build an experience that encourages careful observation, curiosity, discussion, and evidence-based interpretation.<\/p>\n Special collections are preserved so that they will endure, but preservation is not the same as keeping them out of sight. Collections become most meaningful when they are used thoughtfully, when a familiar text becomes a new object of inquiry, and when students discover that a paperback cover can carry its own argument about technology, identity, society, and the future.<\/p>\n For Lucas\u2019s ENG 1103 students, seventeen science fiction paperbacks opened many possible paths into two assigned stories. For the library, the sessions showed what can happen when faculty knowledge, course design, and original materials come together. We look forward to helping other instructors discover what Archives & Special Collections can bring to their classrooms.<\/p>\n Blog post by Gerald Ward<\/a>, Assistant Director & Head of Archives & Special Collections<\/strong><\/p>\n References<\/strong><\/p>\n What does a science fiction cover promise before a reader opens the book? A robot rendered in polished metal may suggest technological confidence, menace, or the uneasy possibility of artificial life. A tiny human figure beneath a vast spacecraft can make the future feel wondrous, threatening, or beyond our control. Even an ordinary aerosol can…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9688,"featured_media":19235,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_hpuaeo_plugin_post_data":"","_hpuaeo_plugin_meta_tags":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1010],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-special-collections"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"IMG](\"https:\/\/www.highpoint.edu\/library\/files\/2026\/09\/IMG_6494-1024x532.jpeg\")
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