Nightshade | Topics for Discussion & Projects

Nightshade Key Questions

Stimulating and interesting discussion of Nightshade may be conducted through several approaches. Most obviously, it may be viewed as a sciencefiction novel and compared with classic works of that genre, or it may be discussed in the larger context of Utopian fiction, as suggested above. One fruitful avenue would be to identify several common themes or conventions of science fiction and explore the ways Butler employs them, perhaps in comparison with other authors' uses of the same or similar conventions. Possibilities include space travel, colonization of other planets, social impact of accelerating technological change, the persistence (or decline) of traditional values in the imagined future, plausibility (or lack thereof) of the author's speculations, coherence and verisimilitude of the fictional world of the novel, and so on. Another approach, especially promising for this book, would involve a consideration of the author's projections about future dialects of English on Mars. It would...
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