E4: Scifi Essay

Q&D Outline:

1. Write a claim (use my samples for inspiration).
2. Write out the main idea for each body paragraph based on the claim you wrote
3. Come up with two examples from the book to support each main idea 
• Explain how the examples from the book make sense and fit
4. Make a connection (or two) between the book and the modern world 
• Explain how the core examples make sense and fit 

Friday we will be typing the first draft.

Next week we will revise, edit, and type the final draft.

Sample Claims:

• Aldous Huxley's Brave New World explores how people change and adapt to their environment based on genetic manipulation and government control. Huxley compares "modern" people like John from the Reservation to future, happier people like Lenina and Bernard. No one is truly happy in the book; although, they are miserable for different reasons.
• Many people have recently compared the way the NSA monitors computers and cell phones to Big Brother from George Orwell's 1984. These comparisons only work on the surface. The NSA isn't trying to control American citizens behavior or thinking through its data collection unlike Big Brother who was so obsessed with having the loyalty of the people that it would test citizens like Winston Smith, break them, and send them back out into the world to show what it could do.
• People have been fascinated by Mars since Percival Lowell first claimed to have seen canals on the red planet. Ray Bradbury used Mars as the backdrop from several short stories in The Martian Chronicles in order to look at human nature, the American government, and the possibility of nuclear war.
• Ray Bradbury was fascinated and repulsed by the way technology changed over his lifetime and the way people became more reliant and more obsessed by it. He feared that people would lose their creativity and curiousity as they gave over "thinking" to machines. Fahrenheit 451 explores a world and people who fear ideas, who fear differences, and who are taught not to think for themselves.
• Guy Montag, the main character in Fahrenheit 451, is a fireman although the profession is very different from what it is now. Now, firemen are heroes who fight fires and save lives. In Fahrenheit 451, firemen are part policement, part pyromaniacs, and part agents of destruction who hunt for readers, thinkers, and libraries in order to keep people from thinking too much.
• Science fiction and mythology explore the same basic ideas: the rules of the universe, the rules of living with other people, and what it means to be human. In Childhood's End Arthur C. Clarke focuses on what it means to be human; he uses aliens and evolution to talk about how important creativity, curiousity, and love are to the average person.