The Empire Strikes Back - Science Fiction, Religion and Society 1
The Empire Strikes Back Science Fiction, Religion and Society
Forget Me Not - Daniel Conway
Introduction and Course Goals
From the seventeenth century to today, science fiction has reflected the aspirations of scientific innovation and anticipated new discoveries. It has reflected rhetorical practices by which science melds present contexts with futurism, extrapolation, and promissory logics. Authors have engaged with ethical problems, fears about innovations gone awry, and pessimism about the prospects of technological development, all while critiquing views on gender, race, and sexuality, and subverting colonial ambitions while engaging postcolonial aspirations. At the same time, science fiction has engaged religious and spiritual views, both interacting with religious imaginaries and engaging with the role of religion in society and in relation to science.
In this course, we trace science fiction through history. We analyze how it has understood science and technology, war and colonialism, sex, race and gender, health and disease. We investigate how it has interacted with religion and influenced social and cultural attitudes. We will read
Background - Forget Me Not - Daniel Conway The Empire Strikes Back - Science Fiction, Religion and Society 2 major works in science fiction and understand how they live with and within us. Topics include: time travel, utopias and dystopias, race, gender, and sexuality, religion and culture, embodiment and disembodiment, posthumanism). In addition to novels and short stories, lectures will incorporate film, television, graphic novels, music videos, and other science fictional subgenres.
Lectures were recorded in Fall 2015–2016. Lectures will be posted twice a week. The course will be accompanied by live sections at times to be arranged.
The course will be accompanied by a film series of major science fiction films. Students are recommended to watch the films individually as they are announced in lectures.
Instructors
Sophia Roosth Ahmed Ragab
Associate Professor of the History of Science The Richard T. Watson Assistant Professor of Science and Religion Science Center, 364 CSWR, 213 [email protected] [email protected]
Teaching Fellow
Wythe Marschall
Ph.D. candidate, History of Science [email protected]
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Grades and Assignments
Grading and Assignments: Grades are divided as follows: a. Participation (incl. blog responses) and attendance 30% b. Two reflection papers 20% c. Midterm exam 15% d. Final project proposal 5% e. Final project 30%
Attendance and Participation:
Participation is a key component of the class and regular informed contributions in lecture and section are necessary. In addition to lecture and section, the course blog and other online tools, serve as media for communications and contributions. 30% of total grade (including 10% for blog contributions).
Two Reflection Papers: a. First response (cognitive estrangement): (2-4 pages) 10% of total grade.
Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn argued in his 1962 classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that science is punctuated by moments of “revolution” in which a discipline’s way of understanding the natural world radically and fundamentally changes. Instead of saying that scientific knowledge is cumulative – that is, building on previous work – he suggests instead that different paradigms dictate disciplinary theories and research agendas until they are replaced by another paradigm. Such paradigms, importantly, are incommensurable. This means that one scientific paradigm cannot judge the validity of another:
“The proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds. One contains constrained bodies that fall slowly, the other pendulums that repeat their motions again and again. In one, solutions are compounds, in the other mixtures. One is embedded in a flat, the other in a curved, matrix of space. Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction (1962/1970a, 150).”
In the second week, you read Kepler’s Somnium, which tries to convince the reader of a new astronomical paradigm – Copernican theory – by writing a science fiction story from the perspective of a lunar observer.
Choose another moment in the history of science in which a new scientific theory was being disputed. A few examples are:
1. The controversy surrounding uniformitarianism (slow-moving forces over long periods of time) vs. catastrophism (abrupt changes in a short time) in geological theory, in particular with regard to the age of the Earth (late 18th-early 19th c.) 2. The introduction of Darwin’s theory of natural selection in 1859 3. The transition from a belief in spontaneous generation to biogenesis (1860s-70s) 4. The shift from Newtonian physics to Einstein’s theory of relativity (early 20th c.)
Imagine you are a science fiction writer living during one of the above scientific controversies (or another of your group’s choosing). Following Kepler’s lead, how would you write a story that uses perspective shifts (or Suvin’s tension between “cognition” and “estrangement”) to jolt your readers out of one world-
Background - Berlin Wall The Empire Strikes Back - Science Fiction, Religion and Society 4 view and convince them of the veracity of a new theory? Sketch out the outline of a short story: in what world does your story take place? Who are your characters? What is the plot of your story? b. Second response (comparative writing): (2-4 pages) 10% of total grade. Choose a theme in science fiction (e.g., time travel, space travel, parallel worlds, utopia/dystopia, apocalypse, etc.). Select two books written around the same time by authors from different countries (e.g., compare a Cold War-era American to a Soviet author). Analyze how the political worlds in which those authors lived shaped the stories they told, paying close attention to historical and sociopolitical context.
Both response papers are due before the final project—that is, any time before Friday, December 1.
*For both response papers, a video essay will be accepted.
Midterm exam:
The midterm is a take-home one-hour exam that will be due on Friday, October 20. The exam will consist of two short essay questions. A week before the exam, we will distribute a list of five possible essay prompts; three of those five questions will constitute the exam, and you may choose to answer two of the three prompts. All of the essay questions will be based on material covered in readings and lectures. 15% of total grade.
Proposal for the final project:
This proposal should help you orient your final project and make sure that it is on the right track. The proposal is 1-2 page long and is due on Friday, November 3. 5% of total grade.
Final project:
This project can take any form; regular paper (10-15 pages), a slideshow presentation, a webpage, a book project, art work, graphic novel, short film, a video game (this is by no means an exhaustive list. Other forms previously submitted include artwork, dance, theatre performance). The final project should engage with course materials in order to synthesize multiple themes from throughout the semester. 30% of total grade. Due on Friday, December 1.
Creative projects should be accompanied by a concept paper (5 pages), which would clarify the viewpoint behind it, its sources of inspiration and (if applicable) a bibliography.
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Schedule
1. The Ship’s Manifest(o): Introduction to the course (M 8/28) 2. Charting the Enterprise: Science and Science Fiction (W 8/30) A NEW HOPE: OPTIMISTIC MODERNITIES
3. Strange and Strange-Making (W 9/6) 4. The City on the Edge of Forever: Travels, Marvels, and Encounters (M 9/11) 5. Woman on the Edge of Time: Feminist Utopias (W 9/13) 6. And Other Women, Also on the Edge of Time (M 9/18) COLONIALISMS AND CATASTROPHES
7. Bread and Circuses: Science and the Making of Empire (W 9/20) 8. Empires and Dark Ages (M 9/25) 9. Behind the Iron Curtain: Science Fiction and Soviet Statecraft (W 9/27) 10. I, Robot: Performing Gender and the Human (M 10/2) 11. Happy Pills (W 10/4) 12. In the land of unbelievers: Colonialism and religion (W 10/11) 13. Scorched Earth (M 10/16) 14. Whom Gods Destroy (W 10/18) THIS SIDE OF PARADISE: POSTCOLONIALISM & OTHERING
15. Revising Empires (M 10/23) 16. The Enterprise: trade in a postcolonial world (W 10/25) 17. Natives and Cannibals (M 10/30) 18. Gender Under Pressure (W 11/1) 19. The New Body (M 11/6) 20. Tentacle Sex (W 11/8) WHERE NO MAN HAS GONE BEFORE
21. Encounters & New Religions (M 11/13) 22. Brother From Another Planet (W 11/15) 23. Science Fiction from the Global South (M 11/20) 24. Tomorrow is Yesterday (M 11/27)
Background - Berlin Wall
Schedule 1. The Ship’s Manifest(o): Introduction to the course (M 8/28)
2. Charting the Enterprise: Science and Science Fiction (W 8/30) How do science and science fiction influence one another? What makes science fiction? and what makes science?
• Paolo Bacigalupi, “The Calorie Man,” Pump Six and Other Stories (Night Shade Books, 2008): 93-122.
EPISODE I A NEW HOPE: OPTIMISTIC MODERNITIES
In this unit, we read science fiction from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century and investigate the making of new science and new societies.
3. Strange and Strange-Making (W 9/6) What is strange about strange things? What role do “strange things” play in the making of science? and how does science influence strange things and their strangeness? Is science fiction strange?
• Johannes Kepler, Somnium (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). • Peter J. Bowler and Iwan Rhys Morus, Making Modern Science: A Historical Survey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005): 23-33.
4. The City on the Edge of Forever: Travels, Marvels, and Encounters (M 9/11) Following on strangeness and strange-making, we ask about marvels and miracles and we wonder about travel and its role in the making of this new science, society and religion.
• Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon (Mineola: Bantam, 2009 [1874]): selections. • David J. Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005): 19-51.
5. Woman on the Edge of Time: Feminist Utopias (W 9/13) On the horizons of optimistic science, one finds utopias that explored the promise of this new world and envisioned new gender roles and new meanings of the gendered self.
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (New York: Dover, 2010 [1915]). • Rebecca Lemov, “Strange Fruits and Virgin Births,” World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005): 11-23. • Herland Feminist Ecovillage: https://www.facebook.com/groups/herlandcommune/
6. And Other Women, Also on the Edge of Time (M 9/18) And other women from other places thought of other utopias too.
• Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein, Sultana’s Dream (New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 1988).
Background - A trip to the moon
EPISODE II COLONIALISMS AND CATASTROPHES
Looking at empires, colonialism and disasters (real and imagined), we investigate the late colonial period in the early twentieth century into the interwar period and to the cold war.
7. Bread and Circuses: Science and the Making of Empire (W 9/20) What role does science play in the making of empires? How do empires produce and consume science, religion and cultural artefacts? What is scientific about empires or imperial about science?
• Isaac Asimov, Foundation (New York: Bantam, 2004 [1951]). • D. Graham Burnett. “Myths and Maps,” Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000): 25-60.
8. Empires and Dark Ages (M 9/25) And what remains of science, religion and society at the fall of empires?
• Isaac Asimov, Foundation (New York: Bantam, 2004 [1951]). (continued) • Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: Penguin, 1994).
9. Behind the Iron Curtain: Science Fiction and Soviet Statecraft (W 9/27) In the heat of the Cold War, we peer through the Iron Curtain to look at science and science fiction in Soviet statemaking.
• Bulgakov, Mikhail. The Fatal Eggs. London: Hesperus, 2003 [1925]. • Gordin, Michael D. “The Soviet Science System.” The Point 8 (2014): 118-127.
10. I, Robot: Performing Gender and the Human (M 10/2) The new sciences and societies emerging from the Cold War conditioned new ways of thinking about gender and thinking about the making of the Human.
• Lem, Stanislaw. “Trurl’s Machine.” In The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age. New York: Harcourt (1985 [1965]): 9-20. • A.M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59, no. 236 (1950): 433-460. • Joseph Weizenbaum, “Eliza: A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine,” Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 9, no. 1 (1966): 36-45.
11. Happy Pills (W 10/4) Exploring biotechnology and state authority
• J.B.S. Haldane, “Daedalus, or Science and the Future,” Delivered to the Heretics, Cambridge (4 February 1923). • Rebecca Lemov, “Psychic Machines,” World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005): 71-86
Background - A trip to the moon
12. In the land of unbelievers: Colonialism and religion (W 10/11) What role does religion play in colonial structures, narratives and identities? What is Religion? and is every religion part of Religion?
• Walter M. Miller, Canticle for Leibowitz (New York: Harper Collins, 2006 [1959]). • James Patrick Daughton, An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006): excerpts.
13. Scorched Earth (M 10/16) On bombs, weapons and destruction. We ask about the social life of the Bomb and what makes a bomb The Bomb
• Walter M. Miller, Canticle for Leibowitz (New York: Harper Collins, 2006 [1959]). (continued) • Joseph Masco, “A Notebook on Desert Modernism: From the Nevada Test Site to Liberace’s Two-Hundred-Pound Suit,” Histories of the Future, Daniel Rosenberg and Susan Harding, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005): 23-49.
14. Whom Gods Destroy (W 10/18) How does religion and science interact in the making of war, colonialism and liberation?
• Walter M. Miller, Canticle for Leibowitz (New York: Harper Collins, 2006 [1959]). (continued)
Background - A trip to the moon
EPISODE III THIS SIDE OF PARADISE: POSTCOLONIALISM & OTHERING
In the third episode, we explore the emerging societies, subjects and identities in the postcolonial world.
15. Revising Empires (M 10/23) How do empires change after the Cold War? What is left of the Empire and why?
• Frank Herbert, Dune (New York: Penguin, 1990 [1965]). • Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980): excerpts.
16. The Enterprise: trade in a postcolonial world (W 10/25) Postcolonially, the world is created on movement--realized, restricted and otherwise imagined. We ask about trade and exchange and the making of the new global environment in the postcolonial context.
• Frank Herbert, Dune (New York: Penguin, 1990 [1965]). (continued)
17. Natives and Cannibals (M 10/30) As the old social sciences acquire new meanings and identities, we ask about anthropology as a social science and as a science of strange-making.
• Ursula K. Le Guin, Left Hand of Darkness (New York: Penguin, 2000 [1969]). • Diane Nelson. “Maya Hackers and the Cyberspatialized Nation-State: Modernity, Ethnostalgia, and a Lizard Queen in Guatemala,” Cultural Anthropology 11, no. 3 (1996): 287-308. • Ursula K. Le Guin, “Do-It-Yourself Cosmology,” The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. Susan Wood, ed. (New York: Putnam, 1979): 121-126.
18. Gender Under Pressure (W 11/1) The new postcolonial world, with its scientific, religious and cultural artefacts, provides for and is faced by questions of gender, gendered subjects and subjectivities.
• Ursula K. Le Guin, Left Hand of Darkness, New York: Penguin, 2000 [1969]. (continued) • Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Feminist Review 30, no. 1 (1988): 61-88.
19. The New Body (M 11/6) How is race inscribed in an emerging postcolonial body? How is it different and how is it the same?
• Octavia Butler, Dawn (New York: Warner, 1987). • Donna Haraway, “From Science Fiction, Fictions of Science” Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Societies (New York: Routledge, 1989): 368-382.
20. Tentacle Sex (W 11/8) How do people and aliens have sex? What makes a sex organ? and what is the making of pleasure?
• Octavia Butler, Dawn (New York: Warner, 1987). (continued) • Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, Routledge 2010 [1990]): 1-46.
Background - A trip to the moon
EPISODE IV WHERE NO MAN HAS GONE BEFORE
In the final episode, we investigate contemporary futurism and dystopias.
21. Encounters & New Religions (M 11/13) In this session, we ask about the emerging and ever-changing meaning of religion. What remains of religion in the twilight of spirituality?
• Nnedi Okorafor, Who Fears Death (DAW Books, 2010). (continued) • James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2010 [1970]): selections. • Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009): selections.
22. Brother From Another Planet (W 11/15) We look at Afrofuturism, race and identity in our contemporary world.
• Nnedi Okorafor, Who Fears Death (DAW Books, 2010). • Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 2 (2003): 287-302.
23. Science Fiction from the Global South (M 11/20) We look at science fiction seen from other places, and futures envisioned from different todays.
• Liu Cixin, The Three Body-Problem, Trans. Ken Liu (New York: Tor, 2014). • Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001): selections.
Thanksgiving Break 11/22–26
24. Tomorrow is Yesterday (M 11/27)
• Liu Cixin, The Three Body-Problem, Trans. Ken Liu (New York: Tor, 2014). (continued) • Frederic Jameson, “Progress versus Utopia: Or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso, 2005): 281-295.
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Books to borrow or purchase
• Johannes Kepler, Somnium (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). o PDF. • Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon (Mineola: Bantam, 2009 [1874]): selections. o Available online: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/83/pg83-images.html (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. • Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (New York: Dover, 2010 [1915]). o Available online: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32/32-h/32-h.htm (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. • Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein, Sultana’s Dream (New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 1988). o Available online: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/sultana/dream/dream.html (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. • Isaac Asimov, Foundation (New York: Bantam, 2004 [1951]). • Bulgakov, Mikhail. The Fatal Eggs. London: Hesperus, 2003 [1925]. • Walter M. Miller, Canticle for Leibowitz (New York: Harper Collins, 2006 [1959]). • Frank Herbert, Dune (New York: Penguin, 1990 [1965]). • Ursula K. Le Guin, Left Hand of Darkness (New York: Penguin, 2000 [1969]). • Octavia Butler, Dawn (New York: Warner, 1987). • Nnedi Okorafor, Who Fears Death (DAW Books, 2010). • Liu Cixin, The Three Body-Problem, Trans. Ken Liu (New York: Tor, 2014).
Background - A trip to the moon