Science FictionOrigins To Parody

AY2014/2015 Semester 1

From its origins in nineteenth-century speculative writing and "lost worlds" romances to its generic reconstruction and intertextual revisiting in Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, science fiction has continued to transform literature and film. In covering texts as different as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Isaac Asimov's Fantastic Journey, and Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as well as Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek, this subject seeks to map the genre's most defining tropes: travel through space, time, and parallel universes; experimental technology; alien life; testing the boundaries of the mind and manipulating the body (cloning). Science fiction has always been experimental in its technique as well as in its critique of social, psychological, and scientific definitions of selfhood, especially as parody has propelled its narrative thrust. This subject leads you through a changing genre that has retained a central quest narrative: a "re-search" of the same in experimental retellings of the alien.