Science Fiction

This module will provide an examination of the critical and theoretical issues connected with the study of science fiction. Focusing on some of the important texts of American and British post-war SF this module aims to provide students with an appreciation of the diversity of the genre, and its engagement with political and social ideologies of the latter half of the twentieth century. Key issues will include imagining possible futures and pasts, the representation of the other, cyborgism and the technology of human life. Students may cover areas such as utopian fiction, cold war SF, the New Wave, and feminist SF, and study authors such as Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard, Joanna Russ and Octavia Butler.