Despite being woefully behind on the Star Wars transmedia juggernaut, I decided to watch the live-action Ahsoka series this week. While I haven’t seen the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars or Star Wars Rebels, which provide the major narrative threads for Ahsoka, I’ve kept up enough with the plot points tangentially (sometimes via LEGO) to respect the characterological mining and intertextual connections that make Ahsoka an interesting story that also does a lot of fan service.
And, I don’t mean fan service in a negative way. The animated stories that provide the foundation for this new live-action series are what kept the Star Wars universe alive for a lot of fans and introduced that universe to a new set of fans. Star Wars might not have have needed an animated lifeline in the same way that Star Trek did in the 1970s, but the animated stories and the fact that it was created forthrightly as canon shows how live-action and animation can both do the heavy lifting of transmedia storytelling of such an important cultural franchise as is Star Wars.
I was taking photos of objects on my desk and this configuration of Little My and The Groke from Tove Jannsen’s Moomin standing in front of Fox Mulder’s UFO poster from The X-Files gave me a chuckle. I thought, if only there had been a “The Moomins and the UFO” book. A quick Google search reminded me that there had been an episode of the Japanese 1990-1991 Moomin anime in which UFOs visited Moominvalley titled “A Close Encounter With Aliens.” A child alien visits, officialdom searches for him, the Moomin characters discover his technology, Moominmama is accidentally shrunk, Stinky steals the shrink ray machine, it is destroyed, and the child alien’s parents show up to collect their little one and set things right. I want to believe (in Moominvalley).
When I saw this image of a cyberpunk computer technician anthropomorphic cat that I generated with Stable Diffusion, the first thing that came to mind was the Bastard Operator from Hell. Having worked at a help desk, I think it would be an interesting experience to be his co-worker. It certainly wouldn’t be boring!
I’m very happy to announce the launch of a new open educational resource (OER) that I’ve been working on for awhile!
It’s called Yet Another Science Fiction Textbook (YASFT). It’s over 60,000 words and includes additional resources that can be helpful for readers, students, and instructors.
YASFT is released under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Creative Commons License. It’s freely available to be read as it is. However, if anyone would like to use it in another way, there are licensing terms that must be followed: “This license requires that reusers give credit to the creator. It allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, for noncommercial purposes only. If others modify or adapt the material, they must license the modified material under identical terms.”
You can find YASFT under the Teaching menu above or directly here.
Its abstract and table of contents are included below.
Abstract
Yet Another Science Fiction Textbook (YASFT) is an open educational resource or OER, meaning it is freely available for anyone to use and learn with. It provides a chronological history of Science Fiction (SF) with an emphasis on literature and film, and it includes other useful resources, such as a glossary of terms, an extensive list of SF definitions, additional resources, a syllabus with hyperlinked readings available online, and video lectures. It tells a story, but not the only story, about SF history. It’s also an experiment in using generative artificial intelligence (AI) to assist with editing a large body of text, in this case over 60,000 words.
Table of Contents
Front Matter What is YASFT? Who made YASFT? Why was YASFT made? Why is it called YASFT? How can YASFT be used? How was YASFT made? Acknowledgements Preface Origins of Science Fiction Early Fantastic Stories Scientific Revolution Age of Enlightenment Romanticism The Gothic Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Science-Saturated Novel Victor Frankenstein’s Hubris Critique of the Age of Enlightenment Tabula Rasa Proto-SF Historical Context Edgar Allan Poe Nathaniel Hawthorne Jules Verne H. G. Wells E. M. Forster Pulp SF Historical Context Overview of Pulp SF Hugo Gernsback E. E. “Doc” Smith C. L. Moore Edgar Rice Burroughs H. P. Lovecraft SF Film Serials of the 1930s and 1940s Buck Rogers Flash Gordon Golden Age SF Historical Context Overview of Golden Age SF John W. Campbell, Jr. Isaac Asimov Ray Bradbury Robert A. Heinlein Frank Herbert Tom Godwin SF Film Through the 1950s Film vs. Literature Early SF Film 1950s SF Film Boom Forbidden Planet New Wave SF Historical Context Overview of New Wave SF J.G. Ballard Harlan Ellison Philip K. Dick Samuel R. Delany Star Trek “The City on the Edge of Forever” Feminist SF Historical Context Beginnings of Feminist SF Definitions of Feminist SF Joanna Russ Marge Piercy Pamela Zoline James Tiptree, Jr. Ursula K. Le Guin Octavia E. Butler Afrofuturism Steven Barnes Tananarive Due Nalo Hopkinson Nnedi Okorafor Cyberpunk Historical Context Coining the Cyberpunk Term Cyberpunk Characteristics William Gibson Sprawl Trilogy and Stories Hermes 2000 and Floppy Disk eBooks The X-Files, “Kill Switch” Bruce Sterling Pat Cadigan Contemporary Science Fiction Historical Context Ted Chiang N. K. Jemisin Cory Doctorow Charlie Jane Anders Martha Wells Mary Robinette Kowal Ken Liu R. F. Kuang SF Film from 1960 Onward 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s Global Perspective: Taiwanese SF Brief Taiwanese History Taiwanese SF Overview Taiwanese Fandom Cultural Comparisons Issues with Translation How to Keep Up With Science Fiction Appendices Appendix 1: Glossary of Science Fiction Terms Appendix 2: Chronological List of SF Definitions of Science Fiction with MLA Citations Appendix 3: Further Reading Textbooks Readers Teaching Online Research Appendix 4: Sample Syllabus with Hyperlinked Readings Appendix 5: Lecture Videos Appendix 6: Version History
These images are called Brain in a Box 1, 2, and 3. The idea behind them was a electronic-organic computer assemblage that fit into a 19″ server cabinet. The brains are modeled on my fMRI scans, and the background cabling and box perspective come from another controlnet layer using a snapshot of a networking setup with bundles of ethernet cables. The lighting details and computing element details varied based on my prompt.
I liked how #2 seems like a universe of constellations of lights and wires beneath a transparent brain-shaped cover.
Number 3 is the brightest of the series. Its brain combines the previous two aspects–transparency and brain folds.
