Outline for Reflection and Final Project

For my final project I would like to do an original sci-fi piece. I did not exactly think about what themes I wanted to incorporate in order to create my story. Instead, I just started brainstorming story ideas, and this one materialized and I am refining the details. As I think about the characters and situation, I am thinking about what would be interesting to imagine, explore and play with.

Here are some rough elements of my story (of course it will change as I get more ideas):

Setting is sometime in the near future of Earth (within the next fifty years)

Civilizations have split into an extremely wealthy elite minority and a desperately poor majority

Climate change has wiped out greenery in cities, led to many extinctions, and submerged major coastal cities

Main characters:

A headstrong ‘female’ humanoid

A sensitive and emotional ‘male’ humanoid

A beautiful, brilliant, woman scientist

More to come!

I’m not sure where the story will take itself in terms of a plot yet.

Themes I think this story will explore are gender/feminism/sexuality as well as feminism from a man’s perspective (inspired by Bell Hooks reading). This story will also explore ‘otherness’ from the perspective of a robot. (Inspirations from “Rachel in Love” and “Rachel”.) I also hope to make points about having male or female attributes despite being in a body casing that demands otherwise (Schofield TED talk). This I think I will do through having the robots made as ‘male’ or ‘female’. I also want to show how gender roles can be just as harmful to men as they are to women (as was mentioned in the Bell Hooks reading). I will try to show parallels between the robots and slavery in the US (hopefully this will not be taken the wrong way). I think mind-body duality could also be explored here, since robots would act as more rational than humans, they could put all humans, male and female, into the category of being animal-like (literally).

As I have not yet done any readings for the other units I’m not sure how/whether my story will incorporate their themes.

I’m not entirely sure why I’ve chosen the positions of the themes I have. I think I was just choosing things that stuck with me, made an impact on me, or themes I just think about when I try to sleep at night. Of course, these all naturally hang in place in my head with the vague plot ideas I’ve run through.