I decided to move away from my original idea and decided to pursue a section of science fiction that I also love, space. Outer space has always had a connection with science fiction, mostly because of the possibilities for fantastic stories such a setting provides as well as the technology associated with it. I plan to do research into why science fiction has ventured into space and claimed it as its own. Whenever a story is set in space it is automatically a science fiction story and I want to know why. This may still be too broad a topic, but I know I want to do something related to do this. Perhaps I will focus on methods of space travel and how these methods affect the worlds they are in. Perhaps I can do it on how technology levels differ from civilizations. I think I can work with these.
While such a topic may consist of a paper I would like to do something more than that, but I am not sure what exactly. Writing a story may be something I want to do, but I don’t want to commit to that idea just yet.
Joel, this switch of direction seems promising, but as you say, it still is a bit amorphous, so it is difficult for me to have a sense of what exactly you will be tackling here. “Outer space” is a huge topic, so the next step is to continue to do some preliminary research in order to figure out what particular aspect of this large topic your Project #2 is going to focus on (one thing you might want to explore is the relationship of space exploration to colonialism, and the notion of the “final frontier”).
Writing a story would be a great addition to this project, if you’re interested in it.