English 150B. Out of This World:
Science Fiction’s Cyborgs, Time Travellers and Dystopias
Monday Wednesday Thursday 11-11:50
Professor: John Plotz ([email protected])
Office hours: Rabb 264 Monday and Wednesday 10-11 and by appt.
Teaching Fellows: Pyunghwa Lee ([email protected])
Abigail Arnold ([email protected])
Ever since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and HG Wells’s Time Machine, science
fiction has been the literary home to our wildest dreams and worst nightmares.
There is no better way to learn about our world as it actually is than studying the
ways writers have dreamed of escaping its rules and restrictions. The class begins
by testing scholarly ideas about “cognitive estrangement,” technological innovation
(“novum”) and self-contained “secondary worlds;” students move on to design
independent research projects about lesser-known works.
Out of This World charts four principal ways that SF over the past two
centuries has imagined alternative to the ordinary. Space Invaders arrived a century
ago from Mars (War of the Worlds) but invasions since then (Strutgarsky , Roadside
Picnic;) have come from stranger and more unexpected places. Cyborgs can be
monsters (Frankenstein), robots, or even stranger forms of manmade intelligences.
Time Travellers can shuttle between past and future (The Time Machine) or they can
arrive from other worlds, subtly different from our own (Man in the High Castle).
Dystopias begin when radical utopias (News from Nowhere) go terribly wrong (We,
1984; Oryx and Crake; Annihilation).
Objectives:
1. Historical. To learn the canon of science fiction from its debated origins in Greek
myth and Sumerian epic through acknowledged initiators (Shelley, Verne and
Wells) through the Golden Age (Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke) to the present day.
2. Formal. To comprehend and test out widely accepted critical criteria for
classifying science fiction (e.g. novum, cognitive estrangement, secondary worlds) and
to develop new critical and theoretical models as appropriate.
3. Comparative. To juxtapose canonical and para-canonical texts from various
nations and develop ways of thinking comparatively about distinctive literary
traditions.
Expectations:
1. Read all assigned material by the day assigned and come to class with
them each day prepared to participate in discussion. All material except for assigned
books (see list below) will be posted on Latte. Post short weekly ungraded
comments about the reading to the Weekly Discussion Forum no later than 10 pm
each Wednesday night (but feel free to post on Sunday or Tuesday night instead).
Attend every class with the text we are reading on that day: more than two
unexcused absences will risk significant grade penalties. [altogether, participation
plus Latte posts: 25% of grade].
2. 2 Expert Reviews These replace your ungraded Latte posts and are also
due at 10pm on Wednesday, posted to the discussion form with the header “Expert
Review.” Expert Reviews are different from ordinary short Latte posts in three
ways: (1) they are longer (500- 2000 words); (2) they must incorporate an outside
source in addition to discussing the main reading for the day. You are encouraged to
use the week’s secondary reading as your second source or to choose one of your
own; (3) they must take a stance on a larger issue related to the book, rather than
just discuss the book on its own. Think of the Expert Review as a short paper—write
more formally, like an expert, and spend more time crafting your post. I will give you
an opportunity to volunteer to be an expert on a particular book. [25% of grade].
3. Participate in a group (3-5 person) presentation; sign up for your group in
the second week of class. I will provide a list of the eligible topics; see syllabus for
possible dates. Your group must provide a handout (1-2 page) with relevant points
and information; you may also incorporate clips or other relevant materials. You
will also each hand in (individually) a 2-page account of your research for the
presentation. [20% of grade]
4. Write a final research-based analytical paper [12 pp], due December 6;
proposal due November 10. Based on an independent research project, which may
(or may not; your choice) grow out of your group research presentation or one of
your “up close” papers. [Notice the timeline of SF novels on the LATTE page, for
inspiration.] [30% of grade].
Computers are permitted only for notetaking and to refer to PDF’s of assigned texts.
Any other use of computers result is not permitted, and may result in a class-wide
no laptop policy.
Week-by-Week Syllabus [Brackets= recommended not required]
On days marked Section, class will be split into two to facilitate discussion.
Thursday August 25: Introduction:
Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
Week 1-2: Origins, Theory, Pleasure
Monday 8/29: EM Forster, “The Machine Stops”
D Suvin, “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre.”
Wednesday 8/31 Clarke, “Nine Billion Names of God”
[Tom Godwin, “The Cold Equations” (1954)]
[Warner, “Uncritical Reading”]
[first weekly latte post due by Wednesday at 10 pm]
Thursday 9/1
HG Wells, “The New Accelerator” (1901) [first story reprinted by Gernsback…]
R Scholes, “The Roots of Science Fiction”
[Brian Stableford, “Science Fiction Before the Genre”]
9/5
NO CLASS
9/7 Forerunners:
Cyrano de Bergerac, Journey to the Moon (1657); [3-29], 30-39; 57-65
Luckhurst, Science Fiction [part 1.. Emergence pp. 1-75]
Frederic Jameson, “In Hyperspace”
9/8
H. G. Wells, “The Country of the Blind” [in Dover Reader), plus TBD
Landon, “Extrapolation and Speculation”
[Paul Kincaid, “On the Origins of the Genre”]
[Bould and Vint, “Problems of Definition”]
[topic: what do scientists want from Science fiction, what difference does it
make to them?]
Check out the “Imaginary Worlds” podcast: listen to one a week for the next
three weeks and come prepared to mention your favorite
episodes/interviews/observations.
Week 3-4: Space Invaders, from There and from Here
9/12 Ray Bradbury, Martian Chronicles (pp. 1-115)
Booker and Thomas, “Science Fiction in Western Culture”
[Mark Bould, “Rough Guide to a Lonely Planet” (2009)]
9/14 Ray Bradbury Martian Chronicles (116-241)
Benedict Anderson “Exodus”
group presentations start…….
9/15 Section meeting: Robert Heinlein, “Universe” (1941)
Ballard, J. G. (1962) "Which Way to Inner Space?" ; “Fictions of Every Kind”
[Poe, “"The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall” [1835])
[Moretti, “Abstract Models for Literary History” ]
[independent research topics: Red Mars, The Dispossessed; or,
later invaders: Ender’s Game, District Nine]
9/19 Arkady and Boris Strutgarsky, Roadside Picnic
Lewis Padgett, “Mimsy were the Borogroves”
Samuel Delany, “”Some Presumptuous Approaches to Science Fiction”
9/21 Arkady and Boris Strutgarsky, Roadside Picnic
Stanislaw Lem, “8th Voyage of Ijon Tichy” (from Star Diaries)
9/22 Section Strutgarsky,
[Andrei Tarkovsky: Stalker]
[Brian Atteberry, “The Magazine Era”]
[Damien Broderick, “The New Wave and Backlash: 1960-1980”]
Week 5-6 Time Travellers and Alternate Worlds
9/26 H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
[C. Alt, “Extinction, Extermination, and the Ecological Optimism of H. G.
Wells”]from Green Planets [1914]
9/28 Robert Heinlein, “All You Zombies”;
Bradbury, “A Sound of Thunder”
Stanislaw Lem, “7th Voyage of Ijon Tichy” (from Star Diaries)
9/29
film: La Jetee
Brian Attebery, “Science Fictional Parabolas” [plus intro, parabola list]
[[H.G. Wells, from “The Extinction of Man: Some Speculative
Suggestions” & “Popularizing Science”]]
[clips; from Invasion of the Body Snatchers]
over the weekend: begin Philip Dick, Man in the High Castle
10/3 NO CLASS
10/5 Ursula Le Guin, Lathe of Heaven
J.R.R. Tolkien. “Fairy Stories”
[Isaac Asimov, “Nightfall”]
10/6 Section Lathe of Heaven
F. Jameson, “World Reduction in Le Guin.”
“The Story’s Where I Go: An Interview with Ursula Le Guin.”
[TBD L Ron Hubbard, from SF to dianetics to Scientology……]
Weeks 7-10 Cyborgs/Cybernetics/Information Fiction
10/10 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Roger Luckhurst, “Automation”
10/12 NO CLASS
10/13 Frankenstein; plus 1910 Edison studio Frankenstein)
[in-class clips from Metropolis]
10/17 NO CLASS
10/19Philip K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
[Carl Freedman, “Philip K Dick and the Construction of Realities”]
[Frederic Jameson “Philip K Dick, “In Memoriam”]
10/20 Philip K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Watch Blade Runner over the weekend
10 /25 [BRANDEIS MONDAY] Brian Aldiss, “Supertoys last all summer long” [clips
from AI]
Donna Haraway “A Cyborg Manifesto”
Brian Aldiss, “Oh No, Not More SF!”
[[from “Steam Man of the Prairies”]]
10/26 Isaac Asimov, “Reason”
Stanislaw Lem, “11th Voyage of Ijon Tichy” (from Star Diaries)
[Harlan Ellison, “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”]
James Gleick from The Information
10/27 Section
Her
10/31 William Gibson Neuromancer
Vernor Vinge, “True Names”
11/2 William Gibson Neuromancer
[clips from The Matrix, Ex Machina [google data-driven]
Butler, “Futurology”
11/3
[Gibson, “Will We Plug Computers into our Brains?”]
N. Katherine, Hayles, “Toward Embodied Virtuality.” (Ch. 1 of How We Became
Posthuman [1999])
{Week 11: The High-Low Culture of SF}
[Texts TBD: a chance to share your favorite story, movie cartoon or video game]
11/7 [Gary Westfahl, “Space Opera”]
Pawel Frelik, “Video Games”
Patrick Jagoda, “Digital Games and SF”
11/9 Farah Mendelsohn, “Fandom”
Gary Westfahl, “The Marketplace”
Karen Hellekson, “Fandom and Fan Culture”
[Vint, “Culture of Science”]
11/10 Section Jess Nevins, “Pulp Science Fiction”
Joan Gordon, “Literary Science Fiction”
Proposal for final research paper due in Section
Week 12-13 :Utopian/Dystopian/Cli-Fi.
11/14 William Morris, News from Nowhere
from More, Utopia, and Bellamy Looking Backward (TBD)
[Parrinder, “Morris, Wells and London”]
P Wegner, “Utopianism”
F Jameson, “Utopias Now” (plus) from Archaeologies of the Future (2005)
11/16 Morris,
[M Foucault, “”Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias” [1984])]
11/17 Morris,
E. Zamiatin, from We [1924] (1-19, [130-136
[Darko Suvin, “Circumstances and Stances”]
11/21 Orwell, from 1984 (TBD)
from Huxley, Brave New World
Raymond Williams, “Utopia and Science Fiction”
11/28 Section
Orwell, from 1984 (TBD)
11/30 [TBD: Cli-Fi and Dystopia Criticism]
Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake
Gerry Canavan “Introduction: If This Goes On” from Green Planets [2014]
[Doc Smith, “Ballad of Lost C’Mell]
[Rachel Carson, from Silent Spring (1962) 1-3, 277-79]
environmental ethos [visitor tbd]
Group Project round-up, paper writing
12/1 Oryx and Crake
Margaret Atwood, “The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake In Context"” (2003)
12/5 VanderMeer, from Annihilation (TBD)
12/7 Conclusion
Final Paper due 4 pm
Book List;
Please purchase this particular edition, to facilitate classroom discussion
Ray Bradbury, Martian Chronicles (Simon and Schuster, 1451678193)
HG Wells, Dover Reader (Dover, 0486802485)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Oxford U. Press, 9780199537167) (important: this
edition only!)
Philip Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Del Rey 978-0345404473)
Ursula Le Guin, Lathe of Heaven (Scribner, 1416556966)
William Morris, News from Nowhere (Oxford, 0199539197)
Orwell, 1984 (Signet, 0451524934)
Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (Anchor, 0385721676)
Arkady and Boris Strutgarsky, Roadside Picnic (Chicago Review Press 1613743416)
Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation (FSG, 0374104093)
Resources on Reserve include:
The science fiction handbook, ed. Booker, M. Keith ; Anne-Marie Thomas
Film List: all available on Latte; those [in brackets] are only recommended
Melies, [Voyage to the Moon]
Frankenstein 1910
Stalker
[Metropolis]
Her
[Ex Machina]
[2001: A Space Odyssey]
Possible group research topics:
Thought Experiments:
E. Abbot, Flatland (D Kreisel, “The Discreet Charm of Abstraction”)
[Star Trek: eg the simulated war episode, the ancient Gods episode]
Ancient Origins
Lucian, True Voyages
Sinbad
R Scholes, “The Roots of Science Fiction”
Plato, Republic
Thomas More, Utopia
Jo Walton, Just City
Gender (and the Genre of SF)
Naomi Mitchison, Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962)
Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1970)
Joanna Russ, "When It Changed” (1972)
James Tiptree Jr. “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” (1976)
Doris Lessing, Making of the Representatives for Planet 8 (1982)
Cf. John Plotz, “Feeling like a Stoic”
Fandom:
Karen Hellekson, “Fandom and Fan Culture”
Farah Mendelsohn, “Fandom”
Gary Westfahl, “The Marketplace”
Galaxy Quest
Satire/Parody
De Bergerac, Voyage to the Moon
Swift, Gulliver’s Travel’s
Lem, Star Diaries
Last Man fiction/film
Daniel Defoe A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)
Mary Shelley, The Last Man (1826)
M. P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud (1901)
End of August at the Hotel Ozone (1967)
The Quiet Earth (1985)
Cli-Fi (and the rise of the Anthropocene)
Canavan,
R Carsons, from Silent Spring
Chakrabarty “Climate of History: Four Theses”
Doris Lessing, The Making of the Representative of Planet 8 (1982)
Soylent Green
Media Shifts
A. SF on film:
a. Frankenstein,
b. Metropolis,
c. TBD
B. Online SF: games, virtual world making
a. Rise of gaming culture
b. “No Man’s Sky”
Quotes for Discussion (some First Day, some later)
Hugo Gernsback. 1926. "By 'scientifiction' I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and
Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact
and prophetic vision... Not only do these amazing tales make tremendously
interesting reading—they are always instructive.
Robert A. Heinlein. 1947. "Let's gather up the bits and pieces and define the Simonpure science fiction story: 1. The conditions must be, in some respect, different from
here-and-now, although the difference may lie only in an invention made in the
course of the story. 2. The new conditions must be an essential part of the story. 3.
The problem itself—the "plot"—must be a human problem. 4. The human problem
must be one which is created by, or indispensably affected by, the new conditions. 5.
And lastly, no established fact shall be violated, and, furthermore, when the story
requires that a theory contrary to present accepted theory be used, the new theory
should be rendered reasonably plausible and it must include and explain
established facts as satisfactorily as the one the author saw fit to junk. It may be farfetched, it may seem fantastic, but it must not be at variance with observed facts, i.e.,
if you are going to assume that the human race descended from Martians, then
you've got to explain our apparent close relationship to terrestrial anthropoid apes
as well."
John W. Campbell, Jr.. 1947. "To be science fiction, not fantasy, an honest effort at
prophetic extrapolation from the known must be made."
Rod Serling. 1962. "Fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science Fiction is the
improbable made possible."
Arthur C. Clarke. "Science fiction is something that could happen - but you usually
wouldn't want it to. Fantasy is something that couldn't happen - though you often
only wish that it could." (emphasis original)
Tom Shippey. "Science fiction is hard to define because it is the literature of change
and it changes while you are trying to define it."
Darko Suvin. 1972. Science fiction is "a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient
conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and
whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's
empirical environment."
… Darko Suvin. 1979. "SF is distinguished by the narrative dominance or hegemony
of a fictional "novum" (novelty, innovation) validated by cognitive logic.”
Thomas M. Disch. 1973. "The basic premise of all s-f….. Absolutely Anything Can
Happen and Should
Norman Spinrad. 1974. "Science fiction is anything published as science fiction."
Isaac Asimov. 1975. "Science fiction can be defined as that branch of literature
which deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in science and
technology."
Patrick Parrinder. 1980. "'Hard' SF is related to 'hard facts' and also to the 'hard' or
engineering sciences. It does not necessarily entail realistic speculation about a
future world, though its bias is undoubtedly realistic. Rather, this is the sort of SF
that most appeals to scientists themselves—and is often written by them. The
typical 'hard' SF writer looks for new and unfamiliar scientific theories and
discoveries which could provide the occasion for a story, and, at its more didactic
extreme, the story is only a framework for introducing the scientific concept to the
reader."
Sturgeon’s Law: “9/10 of SF is crap. But then 9/10 of everything is crap.”
SF is the story of all possible stories in all possible worlds. Therefore, rather than
being a minor genre within the tradition of realist fiction, it contains all realist
fiction within it, as a tiny subset of all its possibilities.
I was obliged to tell them that …their world was merely a moon.
“But you can see land here” they all replied, “ and forests, rivers and seas; what could they all be if not
Earth?”
“Never mind that!” I retorted, “Aristotle assures us that it is merely the Moon; and if you had said
contrary in the classes in which I studied, you would have been hissed.”
At this there was a great roar of laughter. You need not ask whether this was a result of their ignorance.
I was taken back into my cage.
However, the priests were told that I had dared to say that the Moon was a world from which I cam,
and their world was merely a moon. They felt this provided them with a perfectly justified pretest for having me
condemned to death by water.
***
It remains for me to prove that there are infinite worlds in one infinite world. So just imagine the universe as one
huge animal; the stars, which are worlds, are then other animals inside him, mutually serving as worlds for other
peoples (such as ourselves, horses, and elephants), while we in turn are also worlds for even smaller people,
such as boils, lice, worms and mites. These are an entire Earth to other imperceptible creatures, and just as we
appear to be a great world for those small folk, perhaps our flesh, blood, and vital spirits are nothing other than
a whole tissue of tiny animals clustered together, lending us movement from their own, and blindly allowing
themselves to be led along by our will acting as their coachman, driving us along ourselves and producing all in
concert the action that we call life.
After all, just tell me this: is it difficult to believe that a louse can imagine a
body to be a world, and that when one such louse has travelled from one of your
ears to the other, his companions will say of him that he has travelled to the
uttermost ends of the world, or that he has covered the distance from one pole to
the other? Yes, these tiny folk must take your hair to be the forests of their country,
the pores of your skin full of moisture to be springs of water, buboes and mites to be
lakes and ponds, abscesses to be seas, and fluxions to be floods, and when you comb
your hair backwards and forwards, they take this agitation to be the ebbing and
flowing of the sea.
Cyrano de Bergerac, Journey to the Moon (1657; London: Hesperus, 2007, p.65, 83)