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Aliens Abroad: Science Fiction in Global Literature

Module description

Science fiction is a global phenomenon. This module introduces culturally important 20th and 21st -century science fiction from China, Germany, Italy and Russia (including texts by Cixin Liu, Thea von Harbou, Primo Levi, and the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, all in English translation). You will explore the set texts through close readings, seminar discussion, student presentations, and lectures offering historical and cultural context. In science fiction, writers describe and assimilate the challenges of modernization; express anxieties about new technology; articulate their perceptions of the world order, or frame resistance to it. Recommended for interdisciplinary pathways, this module is suitable for specialist and non-specialist students.

Module aims - intentions of the module

You will analyse the main topics of the set texts, their characters, their key scenes and to consider the role that they have had in the recent history of their cultures. You will also discuss the nature of science fiction and find a definition (if any exists) that enables us to compare and contrast the set texts. You will be familiarised with the specific challenges of modernisation in China, Germany, Italy and Russia. Finally, you will be taught transferable techniques of literary analysis and socio-political contextualization.

You will read the texts in translation; lecturers will use close readings and discussion to check that essential passages are fully understood. Lectures will identify relevant critical points, sketch in the historical, social and cultural background to the books’ plots, and form the basis for your preparation. However, you are expected to reflect on the texts and other material independently and to be able to express your personal interpretation of these texts.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 1. Demonstrate an advanced critical understanding of the science-fiction texts studied and the role that the scientific component plays in them
• 2. Demonstrate an informed appreciation of the scientific, technological and cultural changes connected to the development of science fiction

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 3. Analyse complex literary texts, making appropriate use of critical and stylistic analyses
• 4. Situate the texts within their socio-historical and intellectual contexts

ILO: Personal and key skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 5. Adopt a critical approach to the selection and organization of material in order to produce, to a deadline, a written or oral argument
• 6. Present a cogent and sustained argument orally / in writing, in English on a topic chosen from a range of options provided, following broad guidelines but selecting and adapting them as required

Syllabus plan

Topics covered might include:

• Definitions of science fiction
• Science fiction in 19th century China: Race, Industrialisation, and National Salvation (Key text – Han Song, Chinese Science Fiction: A Response to Modernization)
• History and Science Fiction: Liu Cixin’s depiction of the Cultural Revolution, a 21th-century revisit of the 20th century Chinese Socialist nation-building (key text – Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem chapters 1 to 20)
• Nationalism, Internationalism, or Cosmopolitanism: history of humanity and the strange stories of salvation in Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem (key text – Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem chapters 21-30)
• Industrialization and mass production in early 20th-century Europe
• Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou’s Metropolis
• Science fiction in Italy: the writers, the readers, the texts, the translations, the magazines
• Primo Levi, his experience in the Nazi concentration camps and his science fiction, close reading of The Sixth Day
• Close reading and contextulaization of short stories by Anna Banti, Dino Buzzati, Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco,
• Science fiction in twentieth-century Russia, in the context of radical technological progress and the Communist Party’s reconfiguration of culture between 1917 and 1935
• The Strugatsky brothers and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker
• Red Star Tales: analysis and reception
• Revision

Students in need of credits for a specific language should specialize accordingly in the assessments. This will be explained in detail in the first lecture (‘Introduction’)

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Formative assessment

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Re-assessment notes

Deferral – if you miss an assessment for certificated reasons judged acceptable by the Mitigation Committee, you will normally be either deferred in the assessment or an extension may be granted. The mark given for a re-assessment taken as a result of deferral will not be capped and will be treated as it would be if it were your first attempt at the assessment. 

Referral – if you have failed the module overall (i.e. a final overall module mark of less than 40%) you will be required to submit a further assessment as necessary. If you are successful on referral, your overall module mark will be capped at 40%.

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

Set texts:

• Han, Song, ‘Chinese Science Fiction: A Response to Modernization’, Science Fiction Studies 40:1 (March 2013), pp. 15-21.
• Liu, Cixin, The Three-Body Problem. Translated by Ken Liu. London: Head of Zeus, 2015.
• Thea von Harbou, Metropolis (n.p.: Create Space, 2013) [1927], a selection of chapters
• Fritz Lang, Metropolis (UFA, 1927)
• Anna Banti, ‘The Women are Dying’, in The Signorina’ and Other Stories edited by Carol Lazzaro-Weis, available on ELE
• Dino Buzzati, ‘The Saucer has Landed’ and ‘The End of the World’, in Catastrophe and Other Stories (New York:Harper Collins, 2018), available on ELE
• Italo Calvino, ‘The Distance of the Moon’ and ‘The Dinosaurs’, in The Complete Cosmicomics (London: Penguin, 2010), available on ELE
• Eco, Umberto, ‘The Thing’, in Misreadings (London: Picador, 1993), available on ELE
• Levi, Primo, If this is a man (London: Vintage, 1996), a selection of passages available on ELE
• Levi, Primo, The Sixth Day (London: Simon & Schuster, 1990)
• Red Star Tales, edited by Yvonne Howell (Montpelier, Vermont: Russian Life Books, 2015)
• Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker (Mosfilm, 1979)

Recommended texts:

• Der-Wei Wang, David, Fin-de-Siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849 - 1911. (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1997), chapter 5
• James, Edward, ed, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. (Cambridge?; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
• Liu, Ken, Broken Stars: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation. (New York: Macmillan, 2019)
• Thieret, Adrian, ‘Society and Utopia in Liu Cixin’, China Perspectives No. 1 (101) (2015), pp. 33-39
• Erika Quinn, ‘At War: Thea von Harbou, Women, and the Nation’, Women in German Yearbook, vol. 33 (2017), pp. 52-76
• Franz Rottensteiner, ‘Introduction. A Short History of Science Fiction in German’, The Black Mirror and Other Stories. An Anthology of  Science Fiction From Germany and Austria (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), pp. xi-xxxix  
• Emmett, Lucie, Rewriting the Holocaust. Intertextuality in the Works of Primo Levi (Exeter: PhD dissertation, 2001)
• Italian Science Fiction, special issue of Science Fiction Studies vol. 42, no. 2 (2015) edited by Arielle Saiber and Umberto Rossi
• The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi edited by Robert Gordon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)
• Forrester, Sibelan and Yvonne Howell, ‘From Nauchnaia Fantastika to Post-Soviet Dystopia’, Slavic Review 72: 2 (Summer 2013), pp. 219-223
• Khagi, Sofya, ‘One Billion Years After The End of the World: Historical Deadlock, Contemporary Dystopia, and the Continuing Legacy of the Strugatskii Brothers’, Slavic Review 72: 2 (Summer 2013), pp. 267-286
• Krementsov, Nikolai, Revolutionary Experiments: The Quest for Immortality in Bolshevik Science and Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)
• McGuire, Patrick, Red Stars: Political Aspects of Soviet Science Fiction (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1977)
• Schwartz, Matthias, ‘How Nauchnaia Fantastika Was Made: The Debates about the Genre of Science Fiction from NEP to High Stalinism’, Slavic Review 72: 2 (Summer 2013), pp. 224-246

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

• ELE: https://vle.exeter.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=11080 

Key words search

Mikhail Ancharov, Anna Banti, Cixin Liu, Primo Levi, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Thea von Harbou, science fiction, China, Germany, Italy, Russia, Soviet Union, technology, progress, anxiety, modernity, cosmopolitanism, internationalism, history