When Andrei Tarkovsky’s last Russian-made film opens, viewers are transported to a haunting post-apocalyptic sepia-toned wasteland, sometime after a meteor crashes into Earth. In its wake: the mysterious creation of a vivid, colorful patch of wilderness everyone calls The Zone. With its perimeter heavily controlled by the military, The Zone is a seldom-visited place of [...]
Proposal 1. Description of the original text and its socio-cultural and historical contexts: When Orson Welles retold the science fiction classic War of the Worlds dramatically on public radio in 1938, it created an international sensation. The classic science fiction text, originally authored by H.G. Wells, told the captivating story about an alien invasion. It [...]
Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild swept science fiction awards when it was published in 1984 for its depiction of a terrifying interdependent relationship between a parasitic extra-terrestrial life-form called the Tlic and a colony of humans who escaped earth to live on their planet. In this world, Tlics impregnate male humans with their eggs—which, if they aren’t [...]
As Ursula Le Guin asserts in her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness (1980), science fiction is metaphor. She writes, “What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants in our contemporary life—science, all of the sciences, and technology, and the [...]
