3.0

credits

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Stretching as far back as Mary Shelley's pivotal classic, Frankenstein, to Ted Chiang's contemporary masterpiece, Stories of Your Life and Others, science fiction has continually explored and re-imagined the boundaries of what's knowable, what's possible, and what's conceivable. Often derided as a low-brow, trashy genre, science fiction has, nevertheless, played a significant role in inspiring real technological innovation in STEM, fostering more diverse and inclusive social-cultural-technological worlds, and challenging the conventional, normative narratives of their own historical time periods and institutions. In this first-year seminar, we will examine a wide range of classic and contemporary science fiction and film in order to explore how each work attempts to re-imagine, resist, or stretch conventional (or normative) notions of its time, history, place, and modes of social/cultural/ethical engagement. We might look at notions like consciousness, the mind, the body, human, language, time, STEM, race, gender, politics, ecology, or any others that compel our attention. To do this, we will look at both fiction and film in a broad range of hard/soft SF, cyberpunk, dystopian, utopian, and biopunk sub-genres. Authors might include Ursula Leguin, William Gibson, N.K. Jemison, Margaret Atwood, Ted Chiang, Jeff Vandermeer, Octavia Butler, Isaac Asimov, Nnedi Okorafor, or others. Films might include from Blade Runner, Dune, Everything Everywhere All At Once, or others. For a small final project, we will also attempt to turn SF's wild, weird, and wonderful lens back on our own time period by exploring the SF potential that exists in our own majors, labs, research, or experiments by drafting our own short story or non-fiction narrative. The seminar will also include a field trip to Baltimore's highly regarded American Visionary Arts Museum and/or a screening at a local movie theater.