Essays on Science Fiction

After the end of World War II, Americans lived under the fear of nuclear war. The government built up huge arsenals of nuclear bombs, and used propaganda to assuage the American people’s fear. The best known example of that is the Duck and Cover propaganda...

Many science fiction stories feature aliens, especially the interaction between humans and the extraterrestrials. These interactions from range from one-on-one encounters to merely experiencing the aliens’ culture from afar. No matter the nature of said encounter, the human nearly always leaves changed in some way....

George Carlin famously said “When fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts. It will not be with jack-boots. It will be Nike sneakers and Smiley shirts”. This quote couldn’t be more relevant in Dave Eggers novel The Circle in...

Abstract The innovative experiments and findings benefit the present world with power of predictions about futurist scenario. The Socio-political movements exist, before and at times, provide an in-depth analysis of the upcoming ages and events and the same has clearly influenced the literary genres mainly...

Genocide, in which mass amounts of a specific group of people are killed, and cultural genocide, in which the culture of a group is forced in extinction, often arises from violent conflicts that typically have at least one of two main factors driving them: religion...

The science fiction, “I robot”, by Isaac Asimov is a must-read book for beginners to develop an interest in robotics. It gives a collection of nine short stories that imagine the development of a positronic brain for robots which possesses equivalent or superior intelligence than...

Apocalyptic science fiction stories are dominated by the theme of the end of civilization with the influence of technology. For example, By the Waters of Babylon by Stephen V. Benet is a short story where John, the narrator, describes the taboos of his community and...

The anime was created by Mika Nomura and Yoshinao Doi, coordinated by Hiroshi Hamasaki and Takuya sato, and composed by Jukki Hanada, withcharacter design done by Kyuuta Sakai, and music by Takeshi Abo. A self-proclaimed mad scientist Rintarou Okabe leases a room in a trashy...

In the book “Highly Illogical Behavior” by John Whaley, some of the central conflicts the characters faced were mental illness, one’s questionable plan and love triangle. It all starts out with a teenage boy named Solomon Reed, who suffers from agoraphobia, the fear of any...

Setting and Background Information The novel is set in Berne, Switzerland in the spring of 1905. Einstein is twenty-six years old, working on his theory of relativity in his extra time. The novels portrays Einstein’s dreams on physics, time and relativity. The year 1905 has...

This paper is about the postmodern IR theory with the ideas of Michael Foucault and the movie The Matrix (1999). In first place postmodernism explained as a critical IR theory and its assumptions discussed. Secondly The Matrix (1999) will be summarized. After that the movie...

“Divergent” – searching the place you belong to and determining how you fit in as you transition from adolescence to adulthood. Every year, all 16-year-olds must choose a faction. Their choices are permanent “Faction before blood”. Beatrice’s tester (Maggie Q) warns her not to reveal...

“Imagine you live in a country where everyone looks exactly the same as you. Brave new world is a sci-fictional novel in which Aldous Huxley’s futuristic country” Distopya believes everyone should be identical to insure stability and community. No one has their individual identity, everyone...

The Martians in the book and the movie The War of the Worlds are a metaphor for the evils of cultural imperialism because their arrival severs the most important means of communication and transportation technology, challenges religion, and leaves identity unclear. The Martians in The...

In Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, Hoban portrays a post-apocalyptic society ravaged by a nuclear war. While he masterfully crafts the story to warn readers about the dangers of technology, the real achievement is in the strange language, called Riddleyspeak, in which the book is written...

Vivisection, an issue explored by many different scholars, including religious, scientific, and literary, has engendered a fierce debate since its inception. Philosophers early as Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas began addressing issues concerning mankind’s relation to animal, which had great implications in shaping societal views...

The Difference Engine, co­written by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, imagines an alternate historical outcome during the industrial era of Europe in the late 19th century. The book follows three characters with different stories that intertwine respectively with their relation to the Kinotrope cards, a...

The full title of Le Guin’s 1974 novel reads “The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia” and proves to be just what the title suggests. This science fiction novel is also a utopia, but not one which serves as “a hopeful prescription for a near perfect future”...

The mind can only be controlled if at some point, the person starts to believe what is being told to them as truth. It is at that point they will question their own opinions. In the novel, The Circle by Dave Eggers, the protagonist, Mae...

From the beginning of Metropolis, there is a stark divide between the upper class and the working people. We see working people walk like soldier into huge elevators, heads hanging in clear misery, descending into what we can only assume is their version of hell,...

Nothing can stand the test of time greater than the form of relation or sympathy. But even greater than that is the ability to force that compassion and relation into the reverse perspective… in other words, rather than feeling emotion upon reacting simply to what...

“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” This quote from Edsger W. Dijkstra is a fantastic illustration of the question that surrounds the world of artificial intelligence. These technologies have become...

Can an equivalent society really exist? The story, “Harrison Bergeron” gives one point of view reply to this inquiry all through the story. The story depicts one fundamental clash between Harrison Bergeron, a virtuoso kid who is extremely capable, against a “government” that makes the...

What if our world were simply a hyper-realistic simulation, with all of us merely characters in an artificial world? Summarizing The Matrix, it is a movie where people are kept inside capsules and are experiencing a real life simulation without noticing it being artificial. Throughout...

The movie began in an abandoned building, where a woman dressed in black was surrounded by a police squad in a room. The opening scene then cuts to a group of men in suits that arrived to accompany the police in pursuing this woman. With...

The Matrix, as a movie, is a perfect representative for an analysis of Structuralism presenting a reality that is torn between the two ideologies, The Matrix: the movie or the artificial world, the double life of the main character or the red and blue pill....

A home is one of the places in which an individual feels the most safe and enjoys spending a lot of their time. In Octavia E. Butler’s novel, Kindred, the concept of home is complicated by the clashing emotions of the characters Dana and Kevin....

A big government can create dangers in people’s lives by taking away their rights. In Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, a young boy is taken away from his family at the age of 6 and is sent to a battle school in space that...

Orson Scott Card’s novel, Ender’s Game, parallels the concept of the Cold War that developed shortly after World War II which was a state of political hostility. New technologies rose in the 1980s as well, such as the world’s first and only fleet of space...

Movies about contact with aliens are pretty numerous and what aliens mostly do is that they abduct, scrutinize, infiltrate, devastate, enslave, observe, attack humanity. In those rare cases when alien’s intentions are peaceful and harmless, it is usually not a problem to understand them. All...