Science Fiction Fantasy and Politics Discussion
I will post discussion requirement and material you need to read
discussion question: What I want us to focus on this week is the sense in which science fiction reflects the culture that it comes from. We can do this by exploring some major themes that come up in many different science fiction works. (From here on I will abbreviate “science fiction” as “sf.”)
Both essays claim that sf is useful for analyzing our past, present, and future. Booker focuses more on how sf reflects historical issues (for instance, some episodes of The Twilight Zone explore the issues associated with McCarthyism), while Hassler-Forest suggests that today’s science fiction reflects issues related to the dominant economic system of the Western world: capitalism.
Directions: Choose a specific claim from either essay (quote it and cite it). Then, put the claim in your own words. Then, using a work of sf that you are already familiar with, explain how that claim holds true for that work and why it matters. (Don’t worry about length or specificity right now; what’s important here is that you are able to pick out the important concepts from the essays and apply them to different scenarios.) For instance:
In “Early Predecessors to The Twilight Zone: The Birth of Science Fiction Television,” M. Keith Booker writes that the development of nuclear technology in the mid-20th century “led to the widespread realization that science had, for the first time, provided the means by which the human race could literally destroy itself” (Booker 7). This meant that the dark side of technology was now becoming more apparent; before this, technology was often viewed as something helpful and beneficial, but now people had a reason to be more skeptical of its possible detriments. This same theme can be seen in a film such as The Terminator, wherein humankind creates robots that gain sentience and then try to exterminate their creatorsthe entire human race. The threat that the technology we create can ultimately come to harm us is still very relevant today, though perhaps in subtler ways. For instance, humans created cars, which are great for transportation, but they are killing us and the planet by emitting greenhouse gases.
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