Annotated Bibliography

Atomika. “5 Life Lessons I Learned from Star Wars.” Medium, Medium, 4 May 2022, https://medium.com/@iamatomika/5-life-lessons-i-learned-from-star-wars-a89239c80271.

• Wrote on Medium
• Casual audience
• Paraphrases and take quotations from Star Wars movies and applies them to real life
• Atomika – casual writer who works in the video game industry
• The article “5 Life Lessons I Learned From Star Wars” was written by the author Atomika, a young Argentinean immigrant who has experience working in the video game industry. In her article, Atomika takes events that occurred in the Star Wars movies and films and uses them as life lessons that can be applicable to anyone. This further builds upon the idea that science fiction, while often times other worldly and abstract, is created to mimic the real world. Atomkia’s style of writing in this work is very casual, yet evidently well informed about the topic on which she is writing. Atomkia directly presents her evidence to the audience by means of paraphrasing events or quoting lines spoken by characters in various Star Wars media. (From my CR)

Butler, Octavia E. Amnesty, SCIFI.COM, 2003, https://web.archive.org/web/20040222222556/http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/originals/originals_archive/butler/butler1.html.

• 2003 Short story by Octavia E Butler
• Commentary on a number of different human issues
• Fear driven human nature
• Immigrations, racism, Afrofuturism

Chiang, Ted. “Exhalation.” Eclipse Two, vol. 2, Niteshade Books, San Francisco, CA, 2008, Eclipse.

• 2008 short story written by Ted Chiang
• Relates directly to the climate crisis

Durbin, Jonathan. “The Mind-Boggling World of Short-Story Writer Mr Ted Chiang.” The Mind-Boggling World Of Short-Story Writer Mr Ted Chiang | The Journal, Mr Porter, 29 May 2019, https://www.mrporter.com/en-gb/journal/lifestyle/the-mind-boggling-world-of-short-story-writer-mr-ted-chiang-894122. 

• Chiang’s stories can be philosophical
• “Science fiction is really good for performing thought experiments,” says Mr Chiang. “This is something philosophers often do, describing hypothetical scenarios to illustrate philosophical questions. But when philosophers describe a thought experiment, it can seem pretty abstract. Science fiction allows readers to feel the impact on an emotional level.”
• Well known for his thoroughness, world building
• “It is sweet and strange that it takes this fantastical premise – how a person might parent bits of code – to arrive at deeper revelations about what it means to be human.” From article
• Very casual writing, like a book review in a newspaper

Johnston, Antony. “Everything Is Sci-Fi, until It Isn't.” Medium, Writing and Breathing, 9 Feb. 2018, https://medium.com/writing-and-breathing/everything-is-sci-fi-until-it-isnt-8161dde83c93.

• Blog post on medium
• Johnston – published author of sci fi, fantasy, non-fiction, and more books, has written story-based video games
• Very knowledgeable in SF
• Talks about advancement in technology – relates to sci fi
• Casual language, but obviously well-informed writer

Johnston, Antony. “When You Say ‘I'm Not into Comic Book Movies’ You're Probably Lying. You Just Don't Know It Yet.” Medium, Writing and Breathing, 15 Mar. 2017, https://medium.com/writing-and-breathing/when-you-say-im-not-into-comic-book-movies-you-re-probably-lying-you-just-don-t-know-it-yet-f50c6a1e2640.

• Blog post on medium
• Johnston – published author of sci fi, fantasy, non-fiction, and more books, has written story-based video games
• Very knowledgeable in SF
• Cynical tone – implies that the general public’s understanding of comic books is flawed
• Describes comic books as a medium rather than a genre
• Comic book does not immediately mean superheroes, there can be sf, fantasy, educational, nonfiction, etc. comic books

Langford, David. "Afrofuturism." The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Eds. John Clute and David Langford. SFE Ltd/Ansible Editions, 17 Jan. 2022. Web. 2 June 2022. <https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/afrofuturism>.

• Post on science fiction encyclopedia
• Definition of Afrofuturism
• “Literary and cultural treatment of the African diaspora in terms of, or incorporating tropes from, the genres of sf, Fantasy and Magic Realism, as seen from a Black cultural viewpoint; not a subgenre of sf but a genre that intersects sf.”

Langford, David. "Thought Experiment." The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Eds. John Clute and David Langford. SFE Ltd/Ansible Editions, 19 Mar. 2019. Web. 21 Apr. 2022. <https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/thought_experimentLinks to an external site.>.

• SFE used for definition of thought experiment in intro paragraph

Marcus, Halimah. “Ted Chiang Explains the Disaster Novel We All Suddenly Live In.” Electric Literature, CMYK, 31 Mar. 2020, https://electricliterature.com/ted-chiang-explains-the-disaster-novel-we-all-suddenly-live-in/. 

• Talks to Ted Chiang about general questions regarding his work
• Direct answers from Ted Chiang - but relatively casual (not scholarly)
• “In real science fiction stories, the world starts out familiar, a new discovery or invention disrupts everything, and the world is forever changed.”
• Doom (end of society) vs disruption (recreation, maybe certain aristocrats falling, arrival of feudal system in Europe, etc)
• “The people who are the happiest with the status quo are the ones who benefit most from it.”
• “What we’re living through is only partly a disaster novel; it’s also—and perhaps mostly—a grotesque political satire.” - on COVID and Trump administration - talks about how there are some benefits though (paid sick leave, universal health care, etc) - will these stay after COVID?

Moro, Jeffery. “Time Is a Difference of Pressure: Breath as Environmental Media in Ted Chiang's ‘Exhalation.’” Jeffrey Moro, Hugo and Cupper, 7 Jan. 2021, https://jeffreymoro.com/research/2021/mla2021/. 

• Mentions entropy - every action, breath increases entropy in universe - hastening arrival of fatal equilibrium - possibility of death
• Scholarly article - introduce many other sources and uses very academic language
• Explores cultural consequence of scientific concepts (entropy)
• “In this paper, I read “Exhalation” both through and as media theory to suggest that time’s measurement and perception, long foundational problems for media studies, have become urgently environmental. We can apprehend these environmental temporalities through the breath, which operates not linearly but rather recursively, traversing scale in its repetition.”
• Explores interior vs exterior time “On the one hand, time is the embodied sense that one moment follows the next. On the other hand, time is the accounting of theoretically impartial technologies, themselves calibrated against physical phenomena.”
• “As matter, air cannot be exhausted. Rather, the species’ actions exhaust difference, increase randomness, and thereby eliminate mechanical action and its concurrent temporality.”
• Hard and soft time
• “ Yet the ultimate consequence of maximum entropy, the narrator writes, is “the end of pressure, the end of motive power, the end of thought.” Entropy will come for the clocks as well. Clearly a neat division between hard and soft time, between human and mechanical time cannot hold.”
• “John Durham Peters argues that the human body itself is a temporal medium, one that calibrates a dizzying multiplicity of time-scales. Circadian rhythms build the geophysical “pulse” of day/night into living things.”
• After discovery of air pressure diff - story becomes “overt allegory” to human response to climate change
• “possible future when some intrepid explorer breaches the chromium wall and turns the closed system into an open one. The automata may live again, through the introduction of new pressure, new breath, although their minds and culture would not survive.”
• Presents a number of very well substantiated arguments with evidence about parallels to climate change and entropy

Reagin, Nancy Ruth, and Janice Liedl. Star Wars and History. John Wiley & Sons, 2013.

• 2013 book that explains the relationship between Star Wars and history
• Explains that creator George Lucas drew a lot of inspiration from history when creating Star Wars
• Has interviews with Lucas
• “recall real-life totalitarian analogs such as Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler (the head of the notorious SS, or Schutzstaffel) in Nazi Germany or Josef Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria (the head of the NKVD, or secret police) in the Soviet Union.”

Stableford, Brian M. “Entropy.” Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia, Routledge, 2006, pp. 160–161.

• Defines entropy - discusses heat death of universe
• “The second law of thermodynamics—which states that entropy within a closed system always increases, until it reaches terminal equilibrium…testifying to the inevitable ultimate extinction of everything: the ‘heat death of the universe’” 
• Scholarly entry in Science Fact and Science Fiction - Encyclopedia

Vatilo, Essi. “Fafnir—Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research.” Climate Change in a Chromium World: Estrangement and Denial in Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation,” vol. 6, no. 2, 2019, pp. 38–50

• Scholarly Climate change article - main use talking about human reaction to climate change
• Denial
• “Climate change is susceptible to different levels of denial. In terms of anthropogenic climate change, we can see denial at work, especially as a disconnect ‘between scientific knowledge and public opinion’ and ‘opinion and behaviour’”