HONR - Science and Society
Welcome to the course. The main purpose of the site is to provide you with .pdfs of all the readings in the course. You are, of course, welcome to purchase the texts or print them out, but if you find yourself digitally adept, feel free to simply use the .pdfs. A brief word of caution on that, however, is that there are times when a web address for the .pdf moves or is removed.
Readings and Stuff
Margaret Atwood 1939-
The link will give you a .pdf of Atwood's "Oryx and Crake" In week four, we will start assigning you pages, but we wanted you to have early access to get started if you have time now.
Her website (which you can access here) provides this limited biography:
Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa, and grew up in northern Ontario and Quebec, and in Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master’s degree from Radcliffe College.
Margaret Atwood is the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. Her latest book of short stories is Stone Mattress: Nine Tales (2014). Her MaddAddam trilogy – the Giller and Booker prize-nominated Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013) – is currently being adapted for HBO. The Door is her latest volume of poetry (2007). Her most recent non-fiction books are Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (2008) and In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (2011). Her novels include The Blind Assassin, winner of the Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; and The Robber Bride, Cat’s Eye, The Handmaid’s Tale – coming soon as a TV series with MGM and Hulu – and The Penelopiad. Her new novel, The Heart Goes Last, was published in September 2015. Forthcoming in 2016 are Hag-Seed, a novel revisitation of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, for the Hogarth Shakespeare Project, and Angel Catbird – with a cat-bird superhero – a graphic novel with co-creator Johnnie Christmas. (Dark Horse.) Margaret Atwood lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson.
Required Reading Week 2
Thomas Kuhn 1922-1996
For clarity, these two .pdfs below are simply the chapters I & II in a smaller, "easier" to print package.
The first link will give you the full text of "the Structure of Scientific Revolutions." Theo the two links are simply the chapters that we read in bite-sized pieces you may or may not find useful.
According to Wikipedia:
Thomas Samuel Kuhn (/kuːn/; July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American physicist, historian and philosopher of science whose controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term paradigm shift, which has since become an English-language idiom.
Kuhn made several notable claims concerning the progress of scientific knowledge: that scientific fields undergo periodic "paradigm shifts" rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way, and that these paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding what scientists would never have considered valid before; and that the notion of scientific truth, at any given moment, cannot be established solely by objective criteria but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community. Competing paradigms are frequently incommensurable; that is, they are competing and irreconcilable accounts of reality. Thus, our comprehension of science can never rely wholly upon "objectivity" alone. Science must account for subjective perspectives as well, since all objective conclusions are ultimately founded upon the subjective conditioning/worldview of its researchers and participants.
Eric Frank Russell 1905-1978
The link to the right is to "Allamagoosa"; Russell's Hugo Award winning short story.
According to Wikipedia:
Russell was born in 1905 near Sandhurst in Berkshire, where his father was an instructor at the Royal Military College.[2][3] Russell became a fan of science fiction and in 1934, while living near Liverpool, he saw a letter in Amazing Stories from Leslie J. Johnson, another reader from the same area.[4][5] Russell met up with Johnson, who encouraged him to embark on a writing career. Together, the two men wrote a novella, "Seeker of Tomorrow", that was published by F. Orlin Tremaine in the July 1937 number of Astounding Stories.[1][a] Both Russell and Johnson became members of the British Interplanetary Society.
Russell's first novel was Sinister Barrier, cover story for the inaugural, May 1939 issue of Unknown[1]—Astounding's sister magazine devoted to fantasy. It is explicitly a Fortean tale, based on Charles Fort's famous speculation "I think we're property", Russell explains in the foreword. An often-repeated legend has it that Campbell, on receiving the manuscript for Sinister Barrier, created Unknown primarily as a vehicle for the short novel (pp. 9–94). There is no real evidence for it, despite a statement to that effect in the first volume of Isaac Asimov's autobiography, In Memory Yet Green.
His second novel, Dreadful Sanctuary (serialized in Astounding during 1948) is an early example of conspiracy fiction, in which a paranoid delusion of global proportions is perpetuated by a small but powerful secret society.[6]
There are two different and mutually incompatible accounts of Russell's military service during World War II. The official, well-documented version is that he served with the Royal Air Force, with whom he saw active service in Europe as a member of a Mobile Signals Unit. However, in the introduction to the 1986 Del Rey Books edition of Russell's novel Wasp, Jack L. Chalker states that Russell was too old for active service, and instead worked for Military Intelligence in London, where he "spent the war dreaming up nasty tricks to play against the Germans and Japanese", including Operation Mincemeat. Russell's biographer John L. Ingham states however that "there is nothing, absolutely nothing, in his R.A.F. record to show that he was anything more than a wireless mechanic and radio operator".
Russell took up writing full-time in the late 1940s. He became an active member of British science fiction fandom and the British representative of the Fortean Society. He won the first annual Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1955 recognizing his humorous "Allamagoosa" as the year's best science fiction.
Suggested Reading Week 2
Required Reading Week 3
For clarity, this is just a .pdf of the chapter to make it "easier" to print.
Daniel Keyes 1927-2014
The link to the right is Keyes' most famous work: the short story "Flowers for Algernon" that has been made into what Julien will call a less successful novel, as well as, a movie, stage play,and musical.
A website devoted to Keyes provides this biography:
Daniel Keyes is a resident of Southern Florida. Born in New York, he joined the U.S. Maritime Service at seventeen and went to sea as ship's purser. After Keyes left the sea, he resumed his studies at Brooklyn College (now CUNY) where he received his B.A. Degree in psychology.
He was subsequently employed as an associate fiction editor, then left editing to enter the fashion photography business. Keyes later earned a license to teach English in the New York City schools and was granted tenure. While teaching days and writing weekends, Keyes returned to Brooklyn College at night for post- graduate study in English and American literature. After receiving his M.A. degree, he left New York to teach creative writing at Wayne State University. He joined the faculty of Ohio University in 1966, was appointed Professor of English and Creative Writing, and in 2000 was honored with Professor emeritus status. Brooklyn College awarded Keyes its 1988, "Distinguished Alumnus Medal of Honor."
Keyes' award-winning first novel Flowers for Algernon has never gone out of print in hard covers and in paperback (Harcourt, 1966; Bantam, 1968). It has been widely translated and is studied in schools and colleges around the world. In April 1995, Harcourt Brace re-published it in the Harcourt Brace Modern Classic series. At the same time it was released by Parrot Audio Books, narrated by Keyes on cassette tapes.
Required Reading Week 4
This will be less than what we talked about on Thursday. because both forgot that we are doing a superlecture on Tuesday the 6th. We'll be screening the documentary "Sugar Coated" and meet in UC 210 on Tuesday. On Thursday we will start with Weber: Chapters 1 and 2.
Required Reading Week 5
Two texts this week. The first is "We Scholars" from Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil." It is Part 6. The whole text is there for you. On Monday I'll try to make a pdf of just the chapter. The other is a short story from Arthur C Clarke "The Star."