The Syllabus for My Non-Existent SF Course

This is another reclaimed post; I wrote it for a thread on the Straight Dope Message Board back in 2000 and forgot about it for a decade. I obviously haven't taught this or any other course, but, if someone wants to throw enough money at me, I could be persuaded. Also, looking at this a decade later, I doubt there would be time to discuss these works more than very superficially, and it's a very heavy reading load, too. (That 15-week semester might also be unsupportable, as well.) Perhaps it's best that I stayed in the private sector.

Assumptions: one semester at a reasonably good school (i.e., you can expect the students to read one longish book a week), on the university level. I'm assuming a 15-week course, and that I'm just covering genre SF (i.e., post-Gernsback and mostly US).

Week 1: Introduction, etc. Start in on short fiction.

Week 2: Short fiction of the '40s and '50s. Depending on what's in print, I'd use Silverberg's The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. 1 or Healy & McComas's Adventures in Time and Space or maybe one or more of James Gunn's The Road to Science Fiction series.
Necessary texts:
"Fondly Farenheit" by Alfred Bester
"And He Built a Crooked House" and/or "All You Zombies" by Robert A. Heinlein
"A Martian Odyssey" by Stanley G. Weinbaum
"Microcosmic God" and/or "The Man Who Lost the Sea" by Theodore Sturgeon
"Scanners Live in Vain" by Cordwainer Smith
"The Cold Equations" by Tom Godwin

Week 3: The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

Week 4: The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov

Week 5: The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

Week 6: Short Fiction No. 2: The '60s and '70s. Possibly using Dangerous Visions or Again, Dangerous Visions (both edited by Harlan Ellison) as a starting point.
Necessary texts:
"Aye, and Gomorrah" by Samuel R. Delany
one or more short J.G. Ballard pieces, perhaps "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race"
one or more early Roger Zelazny stories, most likely "A Rose for Ecclesiastes"
"Inconstant Moon" by Larry Niven
"The Deathbird" by Harlan Ellison (though there are several other, equally good choices from this author)
"The Fifth Head or Cerberus" or "The Death of Doctor Island" by Gene Wolfe
"The Man Who Walked Home" by James Tiptree, Jr.
one or more John Varley stories, probably "The Persistence of Vision"

Week 7: Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein and The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

Week 8: Dune by Frank Herbert

Week 9: Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

Week 10: The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed by Ursula K. le Guin

Week 11: Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke and Ringworld by Larry Niven

Week 12: Gateway by Frederik Pohl (or possibly Man Plus, also by Pohl)

Week 13: Startide Rising by David Brin and/or Ender's War by Orson Scott Card

Week 14: Neuromancer by William Gibson and Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Week 15: Short fiction No. 3: the '80s and '90s. There's no one book that could cover this; it would have to be a Kinko's-style packet.
Necessary texts:
"Sandkings" by George R.R. Martin
one or more stories by Lucius Shepard, probably "Fire Zone Emerald"
"Swarm" by Bruce Sterling
one or more stories by Greg Egan, including "Luminous" and/or "Oceanic"
something by Connie Willis, possibly "Fire Watch" or "The Last of the Winnebagos"
something by Greg Bear, probably "Blood Music"

And then the final exam. I can see varying the list from year-to-year (maybe swapping in Childhood's End or 2001 for the Clarke selection, adding an early Heinlein novel, varying the short story selection, etc), but this is what I'd use as a framework to present the post-war history of (mostly American) SF.

(If I had a whole year, I'd start with theory -- using Brian Aldiss's Trillion year Spree -- and take the first four weeks or so to do the 19th century, starting with Frankenstein and moving up through Poe and the various other proto-SF writers to Verne and Wells.)