Contemporary Science Fiction

This course focuses on contemporary literary science fiction and its representations and analyses of today's world. Although often setting its narratives in the future or an alternative reality, science fiction engages with contemporary pressures, problems and possibilities, extrapolating from the present to estrange and interrogate its ideas, beliefs and practices. This course introduces students to some of the most influential science fiction writing of the last thirty years, and encourages them to explore how it has depicted and explored the world we live in. Rather than focusing on the history and development of science fiction or attempting a complete survey of the current state of the field, this course will be idea-led: taking two or three key themes carefully specified at the beginning of the course (which might include such topics as identity, time, alterity, consciousness, the human, the posthuman, the alien, counter-factual history, virtual reality, simulation, etc.), it will ask students to discuss their presentation in contemporary science fiction. The literature will be read alongside arguments drawn from science, philosophy, politics and critical theory. Students will be encouraged to examine the way particular genres of science fiction (the short story or novel, 'hard' or 'soft' science fiction, cyberpunk and its cognate subgenres, space opera, utopian and dystopian fiction, etc.) find different means of depicting, exploring and putting into narrative the course's chosen themes. Credit Level - 20 Year taken - Year 4 Undergraduate

Not running in 2025/26