Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Paper Topic: A Sociopolitical Examination of Settings

Since we're talking about our paper topics this week I might as well post about it too.

My topic idea is an exploration of the various 'future Earths' and the common themes between them. This topic offers many more stories to examine: "The Man", "The Girl Thing that Went Out for Sushi", "The Finite Canvas", "In the House of Aryaman", and "Macy Minnot's Last Christmas on Dione". Obviously using all these stories could become too broad, thus hurting the depth of the paper. I'd prefer to focus on the Sociopolitical implications of the Earths  described in "The Man", "The Finite Canvas", and "In the House of Aryaman"; examining the events necessary for these settings to come into being, what we can tell about human political organization from the details provided in the stories, and the social trends we can detect in the stories.

If I can identify some common themes between stories (ie decline of the west and rise of India), I would like to see if they represent a larger trend in Sci Fi or are just an isolated commonality between these specific stories. I would also be quite tempted to draw parallels between the world depicted in "The Finite Canvas" and the movie "Elysium".

2 comments:

  1. This sounds so cool! I would definitely be interested in this, especially your discussion on the rise of the eastern world. I would definitely be careful though; include too many stories for reference and your paper could get very confusing very quickly.

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  2. Your topic is interesting, but when you talk about political organization and social trends, it might be easier to just focus on one or the other. Discussing both may bog the paper down. Or you can break it up: political this time, social the next. Whatever works though.

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