Teachers' Notes Planet of the Cyborgs the Fixers Book 2

Teachers’ Notes Planet of the Cyborgs The Fixers Book 2

SEAN WILLIAMS Illustrated by Nial O’Connor

Teachers’ Notes written by Anita Jonsberg

OMNIBUS BOOKS CONTENTS

Category Junior Fiction Introduction………………………………………...... 2 Planet of the Title Cyborgs The Author……………………………………..………….2 The Fixers Book 2 Author Sean Williams The Illustrator……………………………………..………. 3 Illustratort Nial O’Connor Extent 96 pp Before Reading the Text………………………………. 3 Age 10+ Australian RRP $12.99 Reading the Text………………………………………… 4 Binding Paperback ISBN 978 1 86291 855 9 After Reading the Text (Assignments)……………….. 7 Format 198 x 128 mm Further Reading…..……………………………………… 8

Website…………………………………………………….. 8 )

Teachers’ Notes may be reproduced for use in school activities. They may not be redistributed for commercial sale or posted to other networks. INTRODUCTION

Previously (Book 1 of The Fixers) After discovering silver ‘Fixers’ in the street his family has moved to and pursuing a blue light that shines strangely through his new front door, Ollie finds himself in a real-life battle with an organic castle that wants to eat every village in its path. Having defeated the vicious beast and owning a sword given to him as a parting gift, Ollie attempts to get home through another wormhole masquerading as a ghostly blue door.

Book 2 of The Fixers Ollie finds himself back in his own bedroom. Unfortunately, he discovers that he is already there, sitting up and staring at himself in horror. He is in the right place at the wrong time! Ollie leaves and spots another ghostly blue door near a neighbour’s house. He hurtles through it and discovers himself not back in his own home, but far into the future, in a spaceship captained by a large grey C.A.T. (cybernetically augmented technician) that thinks it’s human. The spaceship Arcadia is responding to a distress call from a nearby space station. Space pirates have taken over the station and have hostages at their own planet, cyborgia. Pixel and children saved from the station must now save their parents, lest they be turned into cyborgs. Ollie and Pixel work together with their e-suits to battle the Queen of cyborgian terror, Number 1, and to liberate the kidnapped parents from the pirates’ evil grasp.

THE AUTHOR

Sean Williams has been writing full-time since 1999, ten years after he wrote his first short story. He has been nominated thirty times for the major Australian awards (Ditmar, Aurealis & McNamara) and has won ten times. Jack Dann has described him as ‘One of the hottest writers in the country ... a major Australian talent’, and added in the bio accompanying his opening story in the World Fantasy Award-winning anthology, Dreaming Down-Under, that he ‘cooks a mean curry’. He lives in the centre of Adelaide, South Australia, where he was Chair of the SA Writer's Centre from 2001 to 2003. For a change of pace, he enjoys DJing any chance he can get.

2 Sean recently finished working on three series simultaneously: The Books of the Change (a solo fantasy trilogy generously supported by the Australia Council), the Orphans series (a post-Spike space opera co-written with Shane Dix, and the Force Heretic trilogy (set in the Star Wars: New Jedi Order universe and also co-written with Shane Dix). Future series include the Books of the Cataclysm, a prequel/sequel series set in the same universe as the Books of the Change, and a diptych of science fiction novels (Geodesica) in collaboration with Shane Dix. He won two Aurealis Awards in 1996, one of them for Best Horror Short Story (‘Passing the Bone’). The other was for Best SF Novel (Metal Fatigue, reprinted by the UK's Swift Publishers in hardcover in 1999). His 1998 novel The Resurrected Man won the Ditmar Award for Long Fiction for that year. He was short-listed for the SA Great Literature Award in 1999, and received it in 2000. He is also known as a collaborator. A non-fiction piece with Simon Brown, ‘No Axis, No Boundary: the Search for a Definition of SF’, was nominated for the William Atheling Jr Award. Together they also won the 1999 Best Horror Short Story Aurealis Award (for ‘Atrax’) and were reprinted in Gardner Dozois' Year's Best SF 15 (‘The Masque of Agamemnon’).

THE ILLUSTRATOR

Nial O’Connor (aka Zeldz Magnoonis) is a Shanghai-based illustrator and comic artist who works on major ad campaigns (including Dove chocolate) as well as his own work. O'Connor was born in Ireland but moved to Australia when he was 7 years old.

BEFORE READING THE TEXT

Time Travel (Physics) As a class, watch the following clip about time travel (links to science curriculum: Occam’s Razor, Einstein’s theory of relativity and wormholes.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLF9_Mt5CNo&NR=1 It features a young narrator, and the clip includes scientist Michio Kaku and Einstein’s theory of relativity (if YouTube is blocked in your school, ask your IT co-ordinator to temporarily unblock it for you, or give you setting for a proxy server). There are also clips of the popular film Back to the Future, which focuses on time travel. Watch Back to the Future and have students create a description of what they would expect to find here on Earth in a hundred years’ time.

3 Cyborgs Have students do the following: 1. Find out what a cyborg is (You will need to simplify the information and limit search terms for this: basically it is an amalgamation of human and machine, though interpretations of the term differ enormously). 2. Watch clips of the first Terminator movie (MA and featuring some violence, so check suitability) or The Bicentennial Man (PG) to demonstrate how cyborgs may work .

Images of cyborgs can be found at: http://images.google.com/images?um=1&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENAU292&t bs=isch:1&q=cyborg&sa=N&start=20&ndsp=20

Professor Kevin Warwick is a professor at Reading University UK, who, as part of his ongoing research, has had robotic implants: http://vimeo.com/8592332 http://www.kevinwarwick.com/photogallery.htm http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/human-cyborg-chips-in-to-help/story- e6frf7jo-1225847207715

NB: Please check all websites for suitability on the date of proposed use.

READING THE TEXT

To get the most out of the novel, it is recommended that you read and discuss it as a class. Chapter 1: The Wrong Universe & Chapter 2: The Cat That Wasn’t a Cat For discussion: 1. What is the significance of the spaceship’s name (the Arcadia)? What does it have to do with the situation Ollie finds himself in? Remind students that all texts are constructs and that most, if not all, elements are planned. 2. Ollie mentions a ‘lolcat’ in his nightmares. What is a lolcat?

Pictures of lolcats may be found at: http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENAU292&q=lolcat&u m=1&ie=UTF- 8&ei=sxPAS7P_IoXtngfarPWdCg&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnu m=4&ved=0CCkQsAQwAw) *Check suitability for your class on each access.

4 Activities: 1. When Ollie discovers ‘himself’, he asks a question only he would know the answer to. What question would you ask yourself? 2. When Ollie goes through another glowing door, he describes the experience as being like ‘a banana in a blender being turned into a smoothie’. Make up your own similes that might describe the experience of travelling through a wormhole. 3. Ollie describes the process of decontamination and changing into a jumpsuit. Using the template below, and working with a partner, design your own space jumpsuit.

Chapter 3: Gross Planet For discussion: 1. Discuss the differences between historical and modern piracy.

5 Activities: 1. In small groups, research famous pirates. A good website is: http://www.thepiratesrealm.com/famous_pirates_pirate_history.html Compile a fact file containing the following information:

PIRATE NAME

LOCATIONS

MOST FAMOUS CRIME DATE OF BIRTH

DATE AND CAUSE OF DEATH

Chapter 4: Down in the Dumps For discussion: 1. How does the author create sympathy for Pixel early in this chapter? Focus on body language and dialogue. 2. Explore Pixel’s desire to be thought of as human. How have his feline aspects helped him in his current situation? 3. We discover a lot about Ollie in this chapter – he is brave and perceptive. How has the author communicated this? 4. The Coca-Cola bottle Ollie discovers is much more than junk to him. What does it symbolise? 5. The broken ‘five’ that Pixel and Ollie speak with is a ‘discard’. What ethical problems are there with creating cyborgs that are later treated like this?

Activities: 1. The cyborgs clearing rubbish in the pit are graded according to ability. They are given numbers that demonstrate how intelligent they are. How would you feel if you had a number instead of a name? Think about your own name. What does it suggest about you? Is it traditional, modern, from another country, spelled oddly? Do you introduce yourself as something other than your birth name? If so, explain why.

6 Teacher: Write a short list of names on the board, ranging from the outrageously aristocratic to the very plain. Explain what ‘connotations’ are, and the possible impressions names can make. 2. Ollie dreams up a virus to infect the pirates with and calls it a ‘freedom virus’. If you could make a virus, what would it do?

Chapter 5: Revolting Robots For discussion: 1. Revise the meaning of ‘connotations’. How many does ‘revolting’ have? What does it mean in the context of this chapter? 2. Why is Ollie uncomfortable about the effects of Pixel’s virus? 3. What sort of image does the author conjure in his description of ‘bodyguards with firewalls’?

Chapter 6: Uprising and Downfall & Chapter 7: A Fate Worse Than Death For discussion: 1. Which side of Pixel comes to the fore when he is angry? How does the author manage to make his behaviour somewhat amusing even in the middle of a tense scene? 2. Explore the paradox in Ollie’s conversation with Pixel at the end of chapter 6.

Activities: 1. Imagine you were given a trans-spatial telescope or a psychic typewriter. How could you use it to improve your neighbourhood or city?

AFTER READING THE TEXT (ASSIGNMENTS)

Creative: 1. Describe an imaginary world that Ollie could help. Focus on what it looks like, who lives there and what the problem is that Ollie needs to solve. 2. Imagine your pet is human. What kind of person would it be? Write a short adventure in which your pet helps or hinders you in some way. Include dialogue and describe your pet’s behaviour when trouble strikes. 3. Pretend you are Pixel. Write about the day when your masters wake up. Where are you and how do your masters speak to you and treat you? What are you thinking? 4. Use a drawing program to design your own e-suit. Write a short report about it, describing all of its capabilities.

7 Analytical: 1. In what ways is the novel like a computer game? Think about the computer terms used throughout the novel, how Ollie travels and the beings he encounters. 2. Using evidence from the text (quotes), choose one of the characters and produce a personality profile. 3. Discuss how Nial O’Connor’s illustrations help to tell the story: think about what extra elements they suggest. 4. How does the author successfully communicate tension in the novel? Focus on three main scenes and use quotes to illustrate your answer.