Essay Topics

PAPER 2

1) Given the stories and novels we have read, what would you say are the one or two most important distinctions between the “new wave” SF writers of the 60s and 70s and the “golden age” writers of the 40s and 50s? You won’t be able to be cover a wide-range of differences or stories in a short essay, but you should be able to focus on a few particulars in a small number of readings. For example, you could consider it most important that the stories tend to have very different ways of organizing narrative and present very different sorts of narrators; or you could suggest that stories from the periods in question have fundamentally different visions about the place of technology in a social order. The difficulty will be to say something specific about particular texts and a particular point with particular evidence to support it. Avoid vast overviews and generalizations.

2) Science Fiction often spends as much time thinking about future religions and other modes of human belief as it does about human technology.  The Parable of the Sower centers on a new/alternative faith. “Houston, Houston” thinks at some length about Christianity and future alternatives to it. How does faith function in one of these fictions? Is it an antidote to science/technology? Is it an alternative system of knowledge that exists beside more empirical forms of it? Is faith displaced or destroyed by science/technology? Perhaps science and technology themselves take on religious aspects in the text that interests you? You’ll probably do best to think about only one novel and its treatment of faith, religion, and divinity.

3) Almost all of the works we’ve read in recent weeks have significant dystopian elements. While all dystopias are broadly unpleasant, each of them imagines the dystopian in different ways. Look at two particular texts and explain what is dystopian about them. What leads to the creation of a dystopian world? What is the reader supposed to think is dystopian about it? Is the dystopia you see absolutely total, or does it allow for (or even foster) utopian (or at least desirable) possibilities? Do all figures in the story see the conditions in it as dystopic? What do these imaginings of alternative social worlds suggest about collective fears or hopes in the later part of the twentieth century (and beyond)?  What do we learn from comparing the dystopian visions you chose that we might not if we looked only at one or the other of them?

4)  The two cyborg movies we’ve seen for class, Blade Runner and Ex Machina, might seem to suggest that the ambition of AIs is to somehow become “human,” though it isn’t always clear what distinguishes humanity from cyborgs.  Do these movies see humans as a higher form of life than the cyborgs in them?  Is so, in what ways are they “better”?  If not, why would cyborgs even want to be human?  Would the world as these films see it be better off without humans?  Without cyborgs?  If the distinction between the two was simply eliminated?  Feel free to write about only one of the movies or about both.  You could ask similar questions of a movie we haven’t seen for class, but I would want to know before you go that route.

PAPER 1

1) “The Roads Must Roll” and Orson Welles’s version of The War of the Worlds link together control of scientific or technical knowledge and political, military, and/or financial power. Both stories appear appear within a few years of each other, in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Do these texts and the creators of them embrace the links between technology and political power? Do they see this linkage as a social problem? In these fictions, what sort of relationship does technology foster between the “masses” and the “elite”? Feel free to discuss just one of the stories or to compare the two.

2) How do Science Fiction texts make their “science” believable? Do all texts pursue this goal with the same commitment? What are the consequences of focusing on plausibility on the one hand and of more nearly abandoning it on the other? To answer this question meaningfully, you’ll have to be very specific about a) the strategies for creating plausibility b) examples of where you see these strategies deployed c) explaining why authors would or would not want to bother with seeming “realistic.” To me, this is the hardest of the three topics.

3) What are the defining and most important features of something “alien” and something “human” in  Alien? In “The Parasite Planet”?  In War of the Worlds, or any one of the fictions we’ve encountered.  In what ways do the interactions between “humans” and “aliens” in these fictions help to define or blur the distinctions between the two? To begin thinking about this question you might ask yourself, for example, if Ash in Alien is an alien?  Is Ripley in some way alien?  You could pick a figure that is obviously Alien instead, but try to bear in mind that most SF aliens have some clear connections to as well as differences from humans.