Familiar Aliens: Science Fiction as Social Commentary, Elaine J. O'Quinn and Heather Atwell

Very apropos to our current unit on Feed, O'Quinn and Atwell provide additional rationales for teaching the dystopian genre of "techno-science" (their term for novels like Feed and Nancy Farmer's The House of the Scorpion, which are both stories of current technology amplified and used for evil purposes).  This article is from an issue of the ALAN Review devoted to exploring all kinds of digital media and "new literacies," graphic novels in particular.  It is actually guest edited by an acquaintance of mine, James Bucky Carter, who was getting his PhD in English education at UVA while I was there getting my Master's and teaching certification.  He is now an assistant professor at University of Texas-El Paso, has been hugely successful with his career, and is the go-to-guy for graphic novels and YA lit.  (I linked to his blog above.)

Anyway, O'Quinn and Atwell advocate for reading newer "techno-science" dystopias, either in addition to or instead of, older science fiction like Frankenstein or H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds.  The authors argue that these techno-science dystopias are more relevant to the daily realities of students today, who are immersed in a digital world.  If a teacher's goal is to help students question the world around them, including ethical dilemmas stemming from technology use, The House of the Scorpion and Feed are both excellent choices.

The authors devote quite a lot of space to summarizing The House of the Scorpion and Feed; since we are reading Feed, I will briefly summarize only The House of the Scorpions (by Nancy Farmer - it's awesome - you should read it), and then summarize the authors' recommendations for using each book.  
The House of the Scorpion is set in a no-man's land between Mexico and the US.  The governments of both countries have come to a sinister agreement to solve the problem of illegal immigration.  The US agrees to turn a blind eye to drug cultivation in the no-man's land, and to ignore drug smuggling into America, because Mexico agrees to manage its own border and prevent any of its citizens from crossing into the US.  The owners of the drug "plantations" in the no-man's land take those who are caught trying to cross the border, and turn them into zombies slaves (called eejits) to work on the drug plantations.  Like this wasn't nightmarish enough, the extremely wealthy can clone themselves to have an available source for organ transplants (this is very similar to the plot of the 2005 film The Island).  The book is told from the point of view of a young boy, who the reader later finds out, (SPOILER ALERT - highlight text to read), is the clone of the drug lord running the plantation.      There are quite a few social issues brought up by the book: immigration for one (I think there is an intended comparison to the plantation-slave system of the American South, as well as the implication that the use of Mexican farm labor in America can be compared to that system), and the relationship between the US and Mexico's drug war (I might point out that drug cultivation is dependent on a willing consumer market).  As O'Quinn and Atwell point out, the book also asks questions about cloning, the use of human embryos, and just what makes a human a human? 

Feed brings up some similar issues of the ethics of technology use in human bodies.  The slaves on the drug plantations of Nancy Farmer's book are turned into zombies by putting computer chips in their heads to control them; Titus's feed is not so different.  His behavior is certainly controlled by the feed, though not to the extent of the eejits.  The authors call Feed's genre "cyberpunk" and compare it to Bladerunner and The Matrix.  Thoughts on this categorization??  (I am not sure about it.)  Other issues raised by Feed which I am sure will come up are in our discussion are an excess of consumerism, treatment of the environment (and the impact of both of those things on other countries), and an over-reliance on technology.

The authors suggest pairing these novels with older dystopias like 1984 (1949) or Brave New World (1932) to consider how those authors' visions of the future have come true, or not, and to speculate about the problems our students will encounter in their lifetimes, as well as potential solutions.

Finally, the authors also suggest connecting to the many dystopian films raising many of the same issues.  For example, WALL-E, appropriate for any group, depicts humans as having utterly destroyed the Earth and departed to spaceships where they can drink super-sized sodas and watch TV all day while sitting down.  Avatar might be another example most students are familiar with.

In my own experience, I have found the dystopian genre to be one of my favorites for using with middle school students because it allows for the discussion of so many deep issues through text that is accessible to students.  I never even feel guilty about watching a film because the discussion is so rich and multilayered.  For example, Avatar at its heart is a story of colonization, which is relevant to all kinds of texts that aren't even in the sci-fi genre (Heart of Darkness, Things Fall Apart, Cry the Beloved Country are a few that come to mind right away - plus, did anyone else notice the major parallel to the Pocahontas story going on in Avatar??  Jake Sully, about to die, saved by the daughter of the chief, and the daughter takes him under her wing and they fall in love, which adds a whole other continent of colonization to the discussion).  When I read The Giver with my seventh grade students, we used it as an opportunity to think about the question, "Is utopia possible?"  They tried to make one - they were charged with deciding on an economic system, political system, religion, etc. that would maximize human happiness, and the conclusion that they all came to was that it was basically impossible to engineer a society where everyone was happy without severely curtailing individual rights, which defeated the whole purpose. 

To wrap it up here with some connections to history, I just skimmed through a biography of Louisa May Alcott - her father, Bronson Alcott, was a progressive educator who founded a vegan utopian society called Fruitlands in the 1840s in Massachusetts.  Real utopian movements throughout history are fascinating to read about and consider in light of futuristic societies in fiction, also serving as a source of social commentary.  Two other examples I can think of are M.T. Anderson's other novel (which I liked much better than Feed), The Astonishing Story of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation (set in Revolutionary War America) and As Meat Loves Salt (which I actually lost patience with), set in the English Civil War.

O'Quinn, E.J. and Heather Atwell.  (2010).  "Familiar Aliens: Science Fiction as Social Commentary."  ALAN Review.  Volume 37, Issue 3.  ProQuest Education Journals. pg. 45-50.