Mid-term Exam Study Guide
Science Fiction: English 245 (Fall 2009)
Dr. Halbert
Your Mid-term Exam will take place on Thursday, October 22, 2009 during our normal class time. It will
consist of two parts: quote identifications and essay questions.
PART I: Essay Question
You will need to prepare an essay exam prep card using the following specifications:
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The card may be no bigger than 5" x 8".
Your name must appear in the upper right corner of the card (with a horizontal orientation so that
the longest side is at top).
A clear space at the top left corner should be left blank for stapling.
You may record quotes on the card, but each quote on the card needs to appear in the essay.
Listing other quotes in an attempt to have the answers to the ID section is unacceptable. Quotes
are expected in the essay since you can prepare ahead of time.
You may not write out the essay on the card, but you may outline the key points.
Failure to follow these directions will result in the card not being allowed during the exam.
I will inspect the card before the exam starts. You may wish to show up early to get my approval.
Essay Options for Final Exam
1. The concept of the "Other" plays a significant role in science fiction. Using at least one (or more)
theorist, discuss three representations of the other in the materials we have read thus far. Shape your
discussion to support a central claim about the "Other" common across your three examples.
2. The figure of the cyborg represents the merging of machine and human, opening up new forms of
identity that can transcend species, gender, culture, or even being alive. Using "The Cyborg Manifesto"
as a guide, identify three potential cyborg figures from the readings and show how they challenge the
readers' expected view of humanity.
3. The nature of reality (or the reality of reality) is often questioned in science fiction, leaving characters
and/or readers at a loss for how to interpret the world in which they find themselves. Using Baudrillard as
a guide, explore three moments in which reality shifts for either the characters or reader in the texts from
the course and discuss how these shifts either fundamentally challenge their assumptions about the nature
of reality or offer intriguing alternatives.
PART II: QUOTE STUDY GUIDE
On your final exam, I will give 5-10 quotes selected from the attached list of quotes generated by the
class. I will ask you to identify 5 quotes by giving the name of the text, the author, and three to four
sentences explaining the significance of the quote. You may need to review the text to figure out what the
quote's context adds to the meaning. Extra credit will be given for any text titles or authors you can
identify from the remaining quotes on the exam: one point for each name, one point for each title. You
may NOT give explanations of the other quotes for extra credit.
The quotes for the exam will be drawn from the list of submitted suggestions listed below:
QUOTE: "A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social
reality as well as a creature of fiction."
SOURCE: Donna J. Haraway. A Cyborg Manifesto. pg. 456
QUOTE: "The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world;"
SOURCE: Donna J. Haraway. A Cyborg Manifesto. pg. 457
Quote: Ideologies of sexual reproduction can no longer be reasonably call on notions of sex and sex role
as organic aspects in natural objects like organisms and families.
Author: Donna J. Haraway, The Cyborg Manifesto (pg. 464)
Quote: “One important route for reconstructing socialist-feminist politics is through theory and practice
address to the social relations of science and technology, including crucially the systems of myth and
meanings structuring our imaginations.” (465)
Source: "A Cyborg Manifesto" by Donna Haraway
Quote: women of color might be understood as a cyborg identity, a potent subectivity synthesized from
fusions of outsider identities and in the complex political-historical layerings of her bio-mythography.
(468).
Source: Donna J. Haraway "A Cyborg Manifesto."
Quote: “We did not originally choose to be cyborgs, but choice grounds a liberal politics and
epistemology that imagines the reproduction of individuals before the wider replications of 'texts'”. (470)
Source: "A Cyborg Manifesto" by Donna J. Haraway
Quote: “The black man among his own in the twentieth century does not know at what moment his
inferiority comes into being through the other.”(189)
Source: "The Fact of Blackness" by Frantz Fanon
QUOTE: Not just a black man, but a black man though the eyes of white people- - Held captive by their
stories about “the niggers
SOURCE: The Fact of Blackness, Frantz Fanon
Quote: “My idea is that all of us, men as well as women, should be regarded as human beings.”(181)
Source: From The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
QUOTE: Thus it is that no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over
against itself. (183).
Source: Simone de Beauvoir From The Second Sex
QUOTE: It is not the Other who, in defining himself as the Other, establishes the One.
SOURCE: Simone de Beauvoir From The Second Sex Pg. 184.
Quote: “How could a human being in woman’s situation obtain fulfillment? What roads are open to her?
Which are blocked? How can independence be recovered in a state of dependency? What circumstances
limit woman’s liberty and how can they be overcome? These are the fundamental questions on which I
would fain throw some light. This means that I am interested in the fortunes of the individual as defined
not in terms of happiness but in terms of liberty.”
Source: Simone de Beauvoir “From The Second Sex pg. 185
Quote: It is science that masters the objects, but it is objects that invest it with depth, according to an
unconscious reversion, which only gives a dead and circular response to a dead and circular interrogation.
Author: Jean Baudrillard, The Precession of Simulacra (pg. 444)
Quote: “Such is simulation, insofar as it is apposed to representation. Representation stems from the
principal of the equivalence of the sign and of the real (even if this equivalence is utopian, it is a
fundamental axiom). Simulation, on the contrary, stems from the utopia of the principal of equivalence,
from the radical negation of the sign of value, from the sign as the reversion and death sentence of every
reference. Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false
representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum.”
Source: Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession Of simulacra” Masari pg. 445
Quote:
Such would be the successive phases of the image:
It is the reflections of a profound reality;
It masks and denatures a profound reality;
It masks the absence of a profound reality;
It has no relation at to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure
Simulacrum.
SOURCE: The Procession of Simulacra, Jean Baudrillard, page 445
QUOTE: "But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to the signs that
constitute faith?"
SOURCE: Jean Baudrillard. The Precession of Simulacra. pg. 445
QUOTE: Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas
Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to
the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of
concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.
SOURCE: Jean Baudrillard "The Precession of Simulacra" P. 451
Quote: No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of
them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. (19).
Source: H.G. Wells "The War of the Worlds."
QUOTE At most, terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to
themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise.
SOURCE War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (19)
Quote: “Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer, up to the very end of the 19th
century, expressed any idea that intelligent live had developed there far, or indeed at all, beyond its
earthly level”
Source: H.G. Wells “The War of The Worlds” Masari pg. 20
QUOTE: And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction
our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanquished bison and the dodo, but
upon its inferior races.
SOURCE: H. G. Wells From The War of the Worlds; Science Fiction Stories and Contexts. Pg. 21.
QUOTE: "They listened, rapped on the scaly burnt metal with a stick, and, meeting with no response,
they both concluded the man or men inside must be insensible or dead."
SOURCE: H. G. Wells. War of the Worlds. pg. 25
QUOTE: "I remained standing knee-deep in the heather, staring at the mound that hid them. I was a
battleground of fear and curiosity."
SOURCE: H. G. Wells. War of the Worlds. pg. 29
QUOTE A hundred and fifty feet at a jump, sailing through the air stretched out like a spear, and landing
on his beak.
SOURCE "A Martian Odyssey" by Stanley G. Weinbaum (39)
Quote: Lord! That queer creature! Do you picture it? Blind, deaf, nerveless, brainless -- just a mechanism,
and yet -- immortal! Bound to go on making bricks, building pyramids, as long as silicon and oxygen
exist, and even afterwards it'll just stop. It won't be dead. if the accidents of a million years bring it its
food again, there it'll be, ready to run again, while brains and civilizations are part of the past. A queer
beast -- yet I met a stranger one!
Source: Stanley G. Weinbaum "A Martian Odyssey." P. 44
Quote: Did you hear that? Lustig ran back to them, wildly. She said 1926! We have gone back in
time! This is Earth! (80).
SOURCE: Ray Bradbury "Mars Is Heaven!"
Quote: “Well I think I’d re-arrange the civilization on Mars so it resembled the Earth more and more each
day. If there were any way of reproducing every plant, every road and every lake, and even an ocean, I
would do so. Then I would, by some vast crowd hypnosis, theoretically anyway, convince everyone in a
town this size that this really was Earth, not Mars at all.”(80)
Source: "Mars is Heaven" by Ray Bradbury
Quote: The story is that local life forms aren't as we really see them. They've put on faces, like ours, to
deal with us. And some of them have filtered into their personnel.
Filtered! As if I were a virus.
Source: Sonya Dorman "When I Was Miss Dow". P. 87
Quote: “He’s not talking to me. He’s not caressing me. He’s forgotten I’m here, and like a false
projecting, I’m beginning to fade.”(92)
Source: "When I was Miss Dow" by Sonya Dorman
Quote: The warden goes to the conjunction: from the cell banks a nephew is lifted out. The koota lies
dreaming of races she has run in the wind. It is our life and it goes on, like the life of other creatures.
Author: Sonya Dorman, "When I was Miss Dow" (pg.96)
QUOTE: “thirty eight, as you count the years; a shriveled sixty as far as my emotional outlook on life in
concerned. Am I a psychologist for nothing?” She drove on with bitter breathlessness, “And he’s barely
thirty-five, and looks and acts younger. Do you suppose he ever sees me as anything but . . . but what I
am?”
SOURCE: "Liar!" Isaac Asimov, page 283
Quote: This robot reads minds. Do you suppose that if asked a question, it wouldn't give exactly that
answer that one wants to hear? (293).
Source: Isaac Asimov "Liar!"
Quote: “Herbie’s voice rose to wild heights, “What’s the use of saying that? Don’t you suppose I can see
past the superficial skin of your mind? Down below, you don’t want me to. I’m a machine, given the
imitation of life only by the virtue of the positronic interplay in my brain – which is man’s device. You
can’t loose face to me without being hurt. That is deep in your mind and won’t be erased, I can’t give the
solution”
Source: Isaac Asimov “Liar!” Masari pg. 294
It was like the whistling of a piccolo many times magnified- shrill and shriller till it keened with the terror
of a lost soul and filled the room with the piercingness of itself.
SOURCE " Liar!" by Issac Asimov (295)
QUOTE: “ I looked at him, stretched out on the floor across the room, his eyes Open, but glazed as he
dreamed his egg dream. No matter what he felt toward the Tlic, he always demanded his share of egg.”
SOURCE: Octavia E. Butler, "Bloodchild," page 123
Quote: “Only she and her political faction stood between us and the hordes who did not understand why
there was a preserve- why any terran could not be courted, paid, drafted, in some way made available to
them. Or they did understand, but in their desperation, they did not care.”(121)
Source: Bloodchild, Octavia E. Butler
Quote: She had bones-- ribs, a long spine, a skull, four sets if limb bones per segment. But when she
moved that way, twisting, hurling herself into controlled falls, landing running, she seemed not only
boneless but aquatic- something swimming through the air as though it were water. I loved to watch her
move. (123).
Source: Octavia E. Butler "Bloodchild."
Legitimate programmers jack into their employers’ sector of the matrix and find themselves surrounded
by bright geometries representing the corporate data.
SOURCE "Burning Chrome" by William Gibson (372)
QUOTE: Chrome: her pretty childface smooth as steel, with eyes that would have been at home on the
bottom of some deep Atlantic trench, cold gray eyes that lived under terrible pressure. They said she
cooked her own cancers for people who crossed her, rococo custom variations that took years to kill you.
They said a lot of things about Chrome, none of them at all reassuring.
SOURCE: William Gibson "Burning Chrome" P. 372
Quote: “I was standing by the bench, looking up at the sky, stupid with the hot afternoon, the humidity,
and she touched my shoulder, the half inch border of taught pink scar that the arm doesn’t cover.
Anybody else ever touched me there, they were on the shoulder, the neck…”
Source: William Gibson “Burning Chrome” Masari pg. 377
QUOTE: Ender nodded. It was a lie, of course, that it wouldn’t hurt a bit. But since adults always said it
was going to hurt, he could count on that statement as an accurate prediction of the future. Sometimes lies
are more dependable than the truth.
Author: Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game (pg.2)
Quote: “With Ender, we have to strike a delicate balance. Isolate him enough that he remains creative otherwise he’ll adopt the system here and we’ll loose him. At the same time we need to make sure that he
keeps a strong ability to lead”
Source: Orson Scott Card “Ender’s Game” pg 27
QUOTE: "Human beings are free except when humanity needs them."
SOURCE: Orson Scott Card. Ender's Game. pg.35
Quote: I know, you've been here a year, you think these people are normal. Well, they're not. We're not.I
look in the library, I call up books on my desk. Old ones, because they won't let us have anything new,
but I've got a pretty good idea what children are, and we're not children.
Source: Orson Scott Card Ender's Game. P. 108
QUOTE: “So the whole war is because we can’t talk to each other.” “If the other fellow can’t tell you
his story, you can never be sure he isn’t trying to kill you.”
SOURCE: Orson Scott Card. Ender’s Game. Pg. 253.
Quote: “Liberty is never unattainable, it must be redeemed by the blood of patriots”
Source: Robert A. Heinlein Starship Troopers
QUOTE: Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the
contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it
with their lives and freedom.
SOURCE: Robert A. Heinlein. Starship Troopers. Pg. 26.
Quote: War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The
purpose of war is to support your government's decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy
just to be killing him... but to make him do what you want him to do. Not killing... but controlled and
purposeful violence.
Source: Robert A. Heinlein Starship Troopers. P. 63
QUOTE: Of course, the Marxian definition of value is ridiculous. All the work one cares to add will not
turn a mud pie into an apple tart, it remains a mud pie, value zero.
SOURCE: Robert A. Heinlein. Starship Troopers. Pg. 92.
QUOTE: To vote is to wield authority; it is the supreme authority from which all other authority
derives—such as mine to make your lives miserable once a day. Force, if you will!—the franchise is
force, naked and raw, the Power of the Rods and the Ax.
SOURCE: Robert A. Heinlein. Starship Troopers. Pg. 183.
Quote: Man is what he is, a wild animal with the will to survive and (so far) the
ability against all
competition. Unless one accepts that, anything one says about morals, war, politics- you name it –is
nonsense. Correct morals arise from know what Man is- not what do-gooders and well-meaning Aunt
Nellies would like him to be.
Author: Robert A Heinlein, Starship Troopers (pg.186)
QUOTE: "One good thing about hypno preparation for combat is that, in the unlikely event of a chance to
rest, a man can be put to sleep instantly by post-hypnotic command triggered by someone who is not a
hypnotist"
SOURCE: Robert A. Heinlein. Starship Troopers. pg. 239
QUOTE: Young, Rodger W., Private, 148th Infantry, 37th Infantry Division (The Ohio Buckeyes); born
Tiffin, Ohio, 28 April, 1918; dies 31 July, 1943, on the island of New Georgia, Solomon’s, South Pacific,
while single-handedly attacking and destroying an enemy machine-gun pillbox. His platoon had been
pinned down by intense fire from this pillbox; Private Young was wounded in the first burst. He crawled
toward the pillbox, was wounded a second time but continued to advance, firing his rifle as he did so. He
closed on the pillbox, attacked and destroyed it with hand grenades, but in doing so he was wounded a
third time and killed.
SOURCE: Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein, page 272.
QUOTE: “I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I've watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in
time, like tears in the rain. Time to die.”
SOURCE: Blade Runner Directed by Ridley Scott