SCIFI CLASS 8: Daybreak by Italo Calvino

Okay, okay, I know what you're thinking... What does Italo Calvino have to do with scifi and gender?

Last meeting we discussed our "World Builder" worksheets. We all had very different, very brilliant ideas for other worlds/stories/characters/settings/dilemmas/etc.

Our "stories" transcended many cultural norms and values. Not only did we negate the concept of gender entirely in many of our stories, by we also negated culturally constructed concepts of time and space. We seemed to be interested in the concept of the "unknown" or the "invisible" or the "shadow"--those factors in life that are so often unexplainable or unattainable through our human means. We have unlocked the prison of our minds and imagined a world anew.

The story we have selected for next week comes from a collection of short stories called Cosmicomics (1965) by Italo Calvino. At Daybreak is a short story about life before matter condenses into forms that we are more familiar with today. What can we learn from our subatomic ancestors and the origins of matter itself?

Please come prepared to discuss this reading and continue working on your "World Builder". We will meet this Friday March 29th at 6pm at Sycamore.

Remember that this class is looking at gender images through science fiction. Can you analyze this reading from a feminist/gender perspective? Why/why not?

“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.” ----Carl Sagan

SCIFI CLASS 7: Freedom to Imagine

Can you imagine a world without prisons? A world without gender? A world with a completely different time structure? It's difficult, isn't it?

Angela Davis states in the first chapter of her book Are Prisons Obsolete?: "Even the staunchest advocates of capital punishment acknowledge the fact that the death penalty faces serious challenges. Few people find life without the death penalty difficult to imagine" (Davis 2003).

> Why is it so difficult to imagine other ways of being?

> How can we change society without first imagining a social system anew?

> Why are our imaginations deeply controlled? And by whom? Or what?

For this next class, we will rewrite the world. I have attached a link to a worksheet I found on a website for beginner writers called "The Scriptorium". "The World Builder" is an aid to your imagination. The worksheet outlines different sections from society, government, time, space, and ontology.

Take a look at the "World Builder" and fill out sections to your heart's desire. Or feel free to come to class with your own writing and ideas! This week is all about creating.

See you this coming Friday March 22nd, the usual place and time.

SCIFI CLASS 6: Looking Through Lace by Ruth Nestvold (2003)

For this upcoming class, Friday March 15th, we will be discussing Looking Through Lace by Ruth Nestvold (2003).

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Excerpt from The James Tiptree Jr. Award Anthology I

Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" (additional reading: not required)

I find this reading to be extremely relevant to our class and our place and society as a whole. I am trudging through it's ambiguous academia, struggling to understand. If you would like to take a look at it, there are versions to be found online. I am going to read it, and possibly form a smaller subgroup of the class that focuses on this reading alone.

Let me know if you would like to form a discussion group relating to this particular essay:

Donna Haraway's
"A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.

An ironic dream of a common language for women in the integrated circuit...

What I Didn't See

Hello Gender and SciFi Readers,

This week we will be reading "What I Didn't See" by Karen Joy Fowler.
On Friday, March 8, come discuss this story with us!  It's an interesting follow-up to "The Women Men Don't See" by James Tiptree Jr, which we read last week.

I will also be referring you all to a piece by Donna Haraway about primates which I think will add something to the experience of thinking about this story. 

This week your homework is to dwell on the word "species..." so.... keep dwellin'

and in the meantime:
silverback eating
gorilla kick!
humanzee
chimp vs cop

I will email both the PDF of the story and the Haraway reading when I get all of your emails from Ally.

see ya friday!
fondly,
your week's facilitator,
Saiya