Weekly Writing Assignment, Week 9

After watching this week’s lecture on the Golden Age of SF, Part 2 and completing the assigned readings and viewings, write at least 250 words summarizing your notes and copy-and-paste your summary into a comment made to this post. Focus on what stands out to you, what were some of the important points that I made, what were interesting elements in the readings, connections between the readings and other SF that you know, etc. Remember, the weekly writing assignment is graded on best effort. I would like to know what you find notable about each week’s class. As long as the posts relate to the class and you give me your best, you receive all the credit. Also, this serves as regular writing practice, which has been shown to improve your writing skills by simply doing this kind of work. It will help prepare you for the writing that you will do on your research essay and the final exam.

13 thoughts on “Weekly Writing Assignment, Week 9”

  1. This week’s lecture was a continuation of the Golden Age of SF. The point that stuck to me the most was that Hard Science Fiction does not always have happy endings. This idea struck me hard as that is exactly what I have been feeling reading most of the texts for the class so far. It reminded me of how most people, including myself, instinctively expect stories to turn for the better, regardless of how inexplicable the solution is. It hit especially hard in the case of “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin. Time and time again while reading I thought that there would be a way to make it to the destination without sacrifices. For example, when the brother does manage to make contact despite the initial attempt failing and practically giving up. The story also leaves no way of blaming the pilot, as he had no other option but to side with “the lesser evil” of the situation. On the other hand, “All You Zombies” by Robert A. Heinlein had what I think has been the biggest twist so far out of the stories we have read for the class. I started the story rather disoriented by the number of characters introduces and their roles in the story. I do believe that the confusion was on deliberate for the purposes of the final reveal that every single character was the same person at different points in time. The story did leave me with a lot of questions like the possibility of a person impersonating themselves. Though I am by no means an expert in genetics, the little rough knowledge I have tells me that it should not be possible, or at least it should not result in a healthy child by any stretch of the imagination. Additionally, I still don’t quite understand what the phrase “All You Zombies” ultimately meant even after the lecture.

  2. Some things I have noticed about the Golden Age of Science fiction part two is that the author Robert A. Heinlein sort of established the idea of Science Fiction mega text. Science Fiction mega text is basically the universal concept of a science fiction topic. A perfect example mentioned in the lecture was the idea of time machines. A lot of people already know of the idea and concept of a time machine, this allows Science Fiction writers to just mention it without having to go too in depth about it because people would already have an idea of what it is. Robert also establishes what good Hard Science Fiction is. Hard Science Fiction is when science is used as the backbone of the story. Uses science to tell the story and this may lead to the story not always having a happen ending when trying to stick with factual science. These pieces of literature also have some political and sexual aspects in them. “All You Zombies” by Robert Heinlein has some mentioning of sexual aspects, such as intersex. In the lecture there was also the mentioning of Solipsism which is when you are only sure of something from your own mind. In “The Cold Equation” by Tom Godwin, the story sort of demonstrates the harsh reality of things such as when Marilyn is ejected from the ship because it puts the whole ship in danger. She was a stowaway who only wanted to see her brother but the rules for stowaway were to be ejected from the ship because the ship had enough fuel for a set amount of people. The hard truth was that Marilyn did see the warning signs but still went, she has to suffer the consequences of her actions.

  3. In the lecture of week #9 is the continuation from last week’s Golden Age of SF. The one thing that really stands out to me was some of Robert A. Heinlein’s significant work, such as Starship Troopers, and Stranger in a Strange Land. The movie of Starship Troopers from 1997 was one of my favorite movies in my childhood, the plot and setting is absolutely amazing on how the humanity needs to do to defend their home from the attack of the bugs. And as for “Stranger in a Strange Land” I know this title from a song with the same name written by Adrian Smith from a band named Iron Maiden. The song was released from an album “Somewhere in Time” in 1986. The lyrics on the song are about an arctic explorer who is searching for brave new world then died and his body were frozen in the ice, after hundred of years later his body is found by the people that is exploring in the arctic.
    In the story “All You Zombies” written by Robert A. Heinlein, I found that this story is quite complicate to understand based on the time traveling part and all the characters roles in the story, but I believe that all those characters are represents the same person in the different time period just have a different gender. In the concept of this idea about “All You Zombies” reminds me of a science fiction movie I watched that movie was call “The One” staring Jet Li. The movie was about multiverses and interdimensional travel, the same person could have a different gender and living in a different lifestyle in a different world.
    In “The Cold Equations” written by Tom Godwin, the story takes place aboard in an emergency dispatch ship going forward to planet Woden. The ship’s pilot, Barton discovers a stowaway an 18-year-old girl Marilyn. At the moment when Marilyn boarding the ship, she did not aware of the law, and Barton told Marilyn that her presence would doom the mission of delivering the medical supplies to the awaiting colonists. In the end, after Marilyn had her last final moments with her brother Gerry, she ejected herself out into space. The sad ending of this story was Barton’s fault, this does not necessarily have to end in a life sacrifice.

  4. The Golden Age of SF took place in a time where world events such as World War ll, the Holocaust, and mass communication began to develop. What stood out to me is that many of the major contributors to the Golden Age of SF, studied physics in college. Whether it is a coincidence or not, the study of physics seems to have a major influence on SF. Hard SF stands out to me because it seems like it’s the backbone or DNA of SF. The way it incorporates science into its storytelling is crucial to the genre of SF. Without hard SF, a lot of SF literature would be dull and wouldn’t catch the reader’s attention. Again, it is a coincidence that many SF authors were science majors in college. In the SF writing piece of “All You Zombies” written by Robert A. Heinlein, we are introduced to many of the concepts of hard SF that were discussed during lecture. The novel focuses heavily on sexuality, which can entirely confuse a reader. Jane, who is a man but travels back in time to impregnate his younger female self to have a child that turns out to be his future self. As weird as it sounds, it caught me off guard because it is very hard to follow. Time travel is a very big part of this piece of writing, however Heinlein doesn’t explain its significance because previous SF writings discussed the time machine and time travel. This cultivates the concept of mega text that Damien Broderick explains for us. This means that time travel or the time machine became a shared value in SF writing. Didactic father figures also appeared in the novel “All You Zombies” when we are introduced to the bartender who based on the text in the novel might be the child’s grandfather or an older version of Jane.

  5. This week lecture focused on Golden Age of SF part 2, basically a continuation of previous lecture. The main characters mentioned were Robert A. Heinlein and Tom Godwin. Heinlein was known as the grand master of F&SF writers of America. He was born in 1907, was graduated in the University of Missouri and then served as a naval officer for five years. He won four Hugo Awards; a prestige award given to the best writer. He wrote many SF stories, but the most famous was “All you Zombies”. The fact that the same character plays all the roles in this story was mind blowing and a little confusing at the same time. The characteristics of this story are hard SF and sexuality. In “All you Zombies” I noticed some terms I’ve never heard before such as Ouroboros, Solipsism, Jukebox. I can relate the word “Zombies” to Call of Duty Black Ops game which was one of my favorites. However, in this lecture I learned the historical definition of this word.
    Tom Godwin was another SF writer of the Campbellian and Astounding traditions who published about thirty stories. His most famous writing was “The Cold Equations” published in August 1954, confronting the reality of the cold equations of natural law. If I could come up with a scenario that it could save the girl in the Cold Equation, it would be to measure the quantity of the fuel needed from the ship to reach its destination using the physics equations, and in addition to that built a reserve tank for extra fuel to avoid any unexpected plot. In my point of view the Emergency Dispatch Sheep (EDS) needed a better engineering construction.

  6. After watching the lecture, I was able to fully process and understand the difference between SF writing and SF film series. For instance, I felt the emotions of Marillyn Closs in “The Cold Equations” by Tom Goodwin, when she begged for her life to be saved, and the elaborate details that demonstrated the empathy that the EDS pilot had for her, and her own thought process before her execution. When watching events such as these on film, it is often hard to truly know how each character is thinking to the very detail unless there is a narrator. I also found it interesting in “All You Zombies…” that the ‘unmarried mother’ established the need to challenge the norms of what it is like to be transgender. The background that the ‘unmarried mother gave on losing her child, having the father flee, and waking up as a man, reflects on how life for young people in the LGBTQIA+ community still go through terrible hardships with laws such as “walking while trans” that gave the NYPD an excuse to detail transgender women for the assumption of prostitution. Not only, but the SF Film “forbidden Planet (1956)” truly demonstrated the real-world conceptions written by Heinlein and Goodwin. I loved watching “Forbidden Planet” because of how much space exploration that our human society is pursuing at the moment, and part of it is colonizing Mars. I can’t imaging taking over planets in our Milky Way galaxy, but the foreboding future that awaited them showed how many consequences there is to come for our human society. The concept and ideas in this SF film make me think about solipsism and the fact that we never really are 100% of our own mind, but rather we are figuring out things along the way. Similarly, I found the metaphor of Morbeus’s daughter being the innocent and blank slated human on their planet, and how the events of the film shifted to the destruction of the planet and the destruction of her innocence along with it. Robbie creeped me out a lot and that also demonstrates our human consequences with artificial intelligence and how they will be taking over our labor forces in the future.

  7. In this week’s lecture the professor continued talking about the golden age of science fiction. This time some more important people of that period were mentioned such as Robert A. Heinlein and Tom Godwin both of which essentially came up with their own original ideas as to how to write science science fiction. SF Films was also a topic that was brought upon because they started to become really popular during that period. Robert A. Heinlein was a writer that took Campbell’s rule, regarding science in science fiction, and took it to another level in a term described as hard science. Hard science SF are stories that are very scientifically accurate. He was also one of the first to add politics and sexuality to his stories to give them an even more serious and mature tone. “All You Zombies” is one such story where sexuality is one of the main focuses of the story. However the sexuality of the protagonist is the least of our concerns in this story, because it includes a lot of confusing time traveling, and in the end, it turned out that every character that we came to know of was actually the same person that came from different time
    periods. Another interesting thing was the mention of the “Ouroboros”. I have seen it before in an anime series called Fullmetal Alchemist, where the Ouroboros symbol was tattooed on monsters that could regenerate any kind of damage they received. I never knew what it meant, but now it makes sense. Tom Godwin was another important writer of that time because of his great hard science fiction stories. He also made us realize that good stories don’t always have good endings. In “The Cold Equations” a girl named Marilyn enters a ship that she is not supposed to be in. It is explained later on that simply her being there sabotages the ship’s mission and she has to be ejected. Marilyn just wanted to see her brother, she did not know about the ship’s weight limit. At this point, other science fiction stories can figure out a way to save Marilyn from her impending doom so that everyone is happy in the end. Godwin however follows hard science fiction and so laws have to be followed. After talking to her brother, Marilyn is then ejected from the ship and into space.

  8. This week we finished off the remaining lecture for the Golden age of science fiction. The main authors talked about were Robert Anson Heinlein and Tom Godwin. Heinlein wrote “All You Zombies” and it was published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1959. While Godwin wrote “The Cold Equation” and it was published in Astounding Magazine in 1954. “The Cold Equations” is about an 18-year-old girl who hides as a stowaway on a spaceship because she is trying to see her brother, she has not seen in 10 years. Since the weight of the spaceship must be a specific number to safely travel to the planet that needs the supplies, her added weight put the pilot and herself in jeopardy. This story is a common example of having to choose between one life being taken versus many. Perhaps the moral of this short story is that death is inevitable and there is nothing you can do but delay it for a little bit. The story was both sad and peaceful, the way Marilyn went from distress to stoicism after learning her fate. The former story was also very interesting to read. it is discovered as the story goes on that the bartender who is the narrator and every other character in the story is all the same person. By traveling back in time, the bartender sets a plan in motion that stretches across decades and believes it ensures his/their survival. Maybe this story was not meant to be completely understood, since it is a paradox, the only way would be to accept that in that universe, time is not linear. This is reminiscent of “The Grandfather Paradox” which states that if you go back in time to kill your Grandfather you would not have been born in the 1st place to go back in time to kill your Grandfather. Further on in the lecture, there was also discussion on the differences between science fiction film and SF literature. The main one being how we as the reader, receive the information, when we read books, we must visualize everything from scratch. Two people can read the same story but visualize the characters, settings, etc. completely differently. Whereas with SF film the creator/director, gives the audience the same visuals to work with, so even if they leave the film with a different interpretation, they still saw the same thing.

  9. Week’s 9 lecture is a continuation of the previous lecture. It’s part two of The Golden Age of SF. Professor talks about Robert A. Heinlein, Tom Godwin, and discuss SF films. Heinlein, a graduate from the University of Missouri wrote many science fiction stories. Some of the characteristics of his works are Future History, Hard Science Fiction, Sexuality, Political, Self-Assured Writing Style, and Didactic Father Figures. Some of Heinlein’s work include “Waldo” (1942), “Starship Troopers” (1959), and many more. But for this lecture we read Heinlein’s “All You Zombies”. The last short story Heinlein would write. “All You Zombie” is about a person who’s been given access to time travel tech. Goes to different points in their life. All the characters in the story are played by one person. But their are a different sex and age. Some terms in this story are Ouroboros, Solipsism, Zombie, and Junkbox. Tom Godwin is the other SF writer we learned about in this lecture. He was a writer of the Campbellian and Astounding traditions and only published 30 stories. Godwin’s “The Cold Equations” was published in the August 1954 issue of Astounding. This story is considered the best example of hard SF. “The Cold Equations” is about a teenage girl who hides aboard an EDS with low fuel to see her brother. When found by the pilot. The pilot had to follow rules and kick her off the ship. But he let’s the girl talk to her brother before kicking her off. In the last part of the lecture, the professor talks about SF films. He talks about four points that the medium is the message. SF films deal with ideas by giving them visual shape. And SF films use illusion and make imagination seemingly real.

  10. “All You Zombies” confused me at first. I was hoping to see zombies, but I got none. It makes me think that maybe our modern understanding of the word zombie is different from the author. I do love the transgender theme, though; rarely do I get to read a story like that. Just when I was thinking that this isn’t a SF, the time machine dropped down from nowhere like a bomb. It piqued my curiosity, but I feel like it didn’t deliver as much as I had hoped from a SF.
    I see the gender stereotype in “The Cold Equations”. I didn’t like how the story is trying to come up with their own definition of what men and women are alike. But I do love the theme of space taboo. There are things that you can’t do in that imaginary futuristic world, stowaway for example. I find the girl’s acceptance of her own death is a little unconvincing, though. There isn’t any big conflict and internal struggle. She is docile and submissive, which probably fits the gender stereotype in this work.
    Forbidden Planet is an engaging film. The scientist’s ego and subconsciousness turn out to be the culprit, which was killing everyone around him. It’s a bizarre story, but it really quenches my thirst for a space story.
    The lecture makes me think about the copy right issue. Corporations such as Disney continue to lobby for longer copy right. They do it because they want to earn more money out of their cultural products. I think it’s an unethical business practice. This phenomenon shows us that the influence of corporation is too great. I think money and corporation should not influence politics, yet, sadly, in reality it does.

  11. In the week 9 lecture, professor Ellis covered the second portion of the Golden Age of SF. We learned about Robert A. Heinlein. He began publishing SF in 1939 and became very well recognized for his writing. We also learned about Tome Godwin (1915-1980) who was the writer of the Campbellian and Astounding traditions and also published about 30 stories. Heinlein wrote lots of SF stories but his most know story is called “All you Zombies”, it was written in 1959. This story was really interesting and it dealt with time travel, sex, and mixed genders. What I found most fascinating is new terms from the story. For instant, Ouroboros which is a serpent or dragon eating its own tail, representing self recreation. The second term is Solipsism which is the idea that we can only be sure of our own mind. And Jukebox is a coin-operated music player. Tome Godwin wrote an SF story called “The Cold Equations” was written in August 1954 and published in Astounding magazine and it confronted the reality of the cold equations of natural law. It is a story that takes place in the future about a young woman secretly boarding a medical spaceship as a stowaway in the hopes that she can visit her brother on a different planet where the ship is headed. There were also important terms in the story like hard science, technology, and rationality.

  12. In the lecture of week 9 we focused on hard SF writers and SF films. Hard SF was defined by Alan Stele as the form of imaginative literature established or carefully extrapolated science as its backbone. Robert Heinlein lived from 1907 to 1988 and was one of the major Hard SF writers. In his writings he often spoke about political conflicts and his own viewpoints. One of his major writings was “All You Zombies” made in March 1959. This story is about a person with access to time travel technology and they are their own parents. We also spoke about SF film and literature. There are four major parts of that separate SF film and literature. First is that the medium is the message with words, and we imagine our own visuals while with film we see what the director visualizes. SF literature deals with ideas using words. SF literature deals with ideas by giving them visual shapes. Finally, SF film does what literature cannot, it uses illusion to make the imagination seem real. An example of this is when you speak to someone on the phone you might imagine what they will look like in your head. But when you see that person face to face, they might be completely different from what you visualized. The first SF film was La Voyage dons laloon in 1902. It was about a voyage to the moon. The first major SF film with a high budget was “Metropolis” made in 1926 by Fritz Langs.

  13. The reading this week of “All You Zombies” by Robert Anson Heinlein published in March 1959 was an interesting read. Heinlein use of 1 character playing multiple parts can be seen in “All You Zombies.” He involves an intersex character that would basically have had sex with himself thus producing the person they are and being their own parents in a sense. It involves a play on time and going back and forth through the past and present and opens more questions than answers for the reader. The story leaves the person reading thinking about what is going on and how to make sense of it. Robert Heinlein uses the term Zombie as people being slow minded. Robert won 4 Hugo awards due to many significant works, these awards are given to the best writers. Tom Godwin also showing to be another talented writer having published 30 stories including “The Cold Equations” that was published in 1954. This story shows the cold equations of natural law between Barton having to eject Marilyn from the spaceship because of the unaccounted weight in order for the spaceship to make it to its final destination. There was a tough decision to make in sacrificing Marilyn or delivering the goods to save many more people. This would make a person think about what they would do if they were in that position. The film “Forbidden Planet” released by MGM and directed by Fred Mcleod Wilcox is a space opera interpretation of “The Tempest” by William Shakespeare.

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