What was the first thing you did this morning? Did you reach for your phone to check email, Facebook, Twitter? Open your laptop to play your favorite song? What was the last thing you did before going to bed? When you stand on a subway platform waiting for a train, what do see? Yes, the typical [...]
It began with: “Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.” Star Trek: The Original Series only made it through three of those five years, but [...]
Section 1: A Universe of Possibilities The first section will represent a section of the universe. The visitors will enter a large sphere, black, with small lights all around – a 3-dimensional representation of the universe that the visitors can walk through. There will be ramps (clear – with railings! maybe plexiglass tubes?) through this [...]
Project Proposal: Babel Video Game Summary: My project will draw from the novel Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany to create a prototype video game called that explores how programming and communication shape reality and individuality. 1. Background on Babel-17 Original Text. Babel-17 is set in a war-torn universe. The Invaders and The Alliance have [...]
Although aware of some disparities with the instructions for the final assignment, here’s what I want to do: Rick and Morty is an exceptionally self-conscious piece of science-fiction. The two main characters, Rick the scientist and his grandson Morty, are obviously a redefinition of Back to the Future’s Doc and Marty. But more than [...]
Original Text Description - Old Sociocultural Horizon Rather than opt for the course of picking a single science fiction text, I want to pick a theme that pervades many science fiction texts. I am interested in examining the agency-safety, humanity-embodiment relationship. A number of characters in science fiction text that we've engaged with in [...]
Jumper, the first novel of Steven Gould, follows a teenager, David Rice, who lives with an abusive, alcoholic father. David discovers the ability to teleport out of his difficult home situation. The novel explores teleportation as a means of escape, and as David learns and grows, he teleports his way to love and wealth, and [...]
For my final project I plan to map and and display, in an interactive fashion, the world of New New York City from the television show Futurama on top of a map of New York City circa 1999. Futurama, first released in 1999, features a main character, Philip J. Fry, who is frozen on December [...]
James Tiptree Jr.’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” examines the ways technology can intervene, expand, and complicate the relationships and boundaries between a body and a person. First published in 1973, it is steeped in the cultural questions of the day regarding women, their bodies, and their agency. Written by an author who used [...]
Johnathan McCauley A Metamorphosis of Metamorphosis A. Metamorphosis is a science fiction text that questions our tendency to privilege human beings over all other species. More specifically, this novella forces us to reconsider the emphasis we routinely place on the human body as a necessary quality of classifying as a human being. Kafka [...]
