Racism and Science Fiction
This typed, double-spaced paper must be 9-10 pp. in length and include a work cited page with a minimum of 8 scholarly sources (4 of which may be from your assigned readings).
List of Sources
Samuel R. Delany, “Racism and Science Fiction”
Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”
China Miéville, “Cognition as Ideology: A Dialectic of SF Theory”
Darko Suvin, “SF and the Novum”
Robert A. Heinlein, “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction”
Hugo Gernsback, H.G. wells, Robert Heinlein
Description: While this paper requires the most research, it is also the most open-ended in subject matter: you must compose an original argument about how science fiction transforms history and culture, sometimes in radical ways, and yet through those transformations is always dialoguing with and critiquing—often trenchantly—the world we live in and the culture(s) we inhabit today.
Your essay must address two or more of the following topics: science fiction and race/ism, science fiction and sex/ism, science fiction and gender; science fiction and class. You must draw evidence and support for your argument(s) from at least two of any of the assigned short stories for this class. (You may also, if you wish, bring in stories or other media not included in the syllabus.)
List of short stories read in class:
Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Friendly Cannibals C.L. Moore, “Shambleau”
Nisi Shawl, “At the Huts of Ajala” Edmond Hamilton, “The Man Who Evolved”
Ted Chiang, “Exhalation” W.E.B. DuBois, “The Comet”
E.M. Forster, “The Machine Stops” Octavia Butler, “Bloodchild”
William Gibson, “Burning Chrome”
Stanislaw Lem, “The Seventh Voyage”
Simon Ortiz, “Men on the Moon”
