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] Background - Forget Me Not - Daniel Conway The Empire Strikes Back - Science Fiction, Religion and Society 3 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. Background - Berlin Wall The Empire Strikes Back - Science Fiction, Religion and Society 5 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.