Course Materials for English 192, Summer Session B, 2013

Science Fiction: Other Worlds, Other Lives

Course Syllabus. Covers general guidelines for participating in course; explains basic expectations; explains basis for course grade.

GauchoSpace login. Additional required reading materials for the course can be found here.

Extra-credit survey for those who edited the study guide or used it as a study tool in preparing for the final exam.

Make-Up "Quiz". An opportunity to make up for a missed quiz, or a low quiz score.

Grading Rubric for Analytical Papers. Explains how I grade analytical papers. Very detailed.

Extra-Credit Rubric. Explains how I assign a grade to an extra-credit presentation.

Grading Rubric for Student Fiction. Explains how I grade student fiction.

How Your Grade Is Calculated (in Excruciating Detail). A document that attempts to exhaustively describe how I calculate your total grade for the quarter.

Twitter stream for the course. Contains reminders about upcoming events, links to articles and other content about related topics, and pointers to electronic copies of documents distributed in lecture. Don't want to sign up for Twitter? Add this RSS feed to Google Reader, My Yahoo!, or your favorite feed reader/aggregator, and keep up with the course announcements using services you already use.

Topics for Paper One. This assignment is due at 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, 22 August. You may also want to take a look at my grading rubric.

Second Paper Assignment. This assignment is due at 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, 12 September. Depending on which option you pick, you may also want to take a look at my grading rubric for analytical papers or grading rubric for fiction.

Sample MLA-Compliant Paper. A sample paper that is formatted correctly according to the MLA guidelines, with notes on areas in which students often make errors.

Research resources. These should be useful resources for those interested in plunging deeper into issues raised in class, and may be useful in preparing for one or both of your papers. (They should also be generally useful resources for scholarly research in the humanities.) You may find it helpful to log into the UCSB Library Proxy Server before clicking on the following links:

• MLA International Bibliography (log in via ProQuest or LION)
• JSTOR
• Google Scholar
• The UCSB Library's (full-text) Electronic Journals database
• Project MUSE
• SAGE journals
• The UCSB Library's advanced search
• … I would also like to put in a plug for Zotero, which is fantastic (and free!) academic research software that integrates with many web browsers (which is where you're doing your research anyway, right?) — especially Firefox, but also (to some extent) Chrome and Safari. It can also be used as standalone software (although it's not as useful that way). You may want to view their introductory video to see what it can do for you. I use it personally and recommend it highly.

Lecture slide shows

Though these are not a substitute for coming to lecture, they may be helpful in preparing for the final.

• Lecture 1: Introduction (5 August 2013). No slide show, just a brief discussion of the major parts of the syllabus and the beginning of Ridley Scott's Alien.
• Lecture 2 (6 August): No lecture at all, just a continuation of our viewing of Alien.
• Lecture 3 (7 August): The Cosmological View.
• Lecture 4 (8 August): Hybrid Life. Also: A recording of Willem Swart's extra-credit presentation (requires GauchoSpace login) is available and may be useful in reviewing for the final exam.
• Lecture 5 (12 August): Traces of the Vanished World.
• Lecture 6 (13 August): Some Characteristics of SF.
• Lecture 7 (14 August): Purity, Deviation, and Judgment.
• Lecture 8 (15 August): Imagining the Future.
• Lecture 9 (19 August): Utopia and Other Science Fictions.
• Lecture 10 (20 August): Cui bono?
• Lecture 11 (21 August): Scientific Productions.
• Lecture 12 (22 August): The Robot Apocalypse.
• Lecture 13 (26 August): Perception/Epistemology.
• Lecture 14 (27 August): Into Gethen. Also: Lauren Bacon's notes for her extra-credit presentation are available.
• Lecture 15 (28 August): The Body and the Face.
• Lecture 16 (29 August): The Dream of Integration.
• Lecture 17 (3 September): Time Travel in Kindred (guest lecture by Shannon Brennan).
• Lecture 18 (4 September): The Turn to Speculative Fiction.
• Lecture 19 (5 September): Who Is Tiptree, What Is He?
• Lecture 20 (9 September): Cyberpunk and Biopunk.
• Lecture 21 (10 September): It's just good business.
• Lecture 22: (11 September 2013): The Precarious Life of Emiko.