Rocket night weinstein

Last, First LCS121-XX

Word Count: XXXX

This is a Title: This is its Subtitle

First and foremost, hook your reader with an introductory sentence that fails to repel, and

then swiftly bring your exhibit text into your paper’s introduction. As discussed in class, you

might want to use book reviews or scholarship to help set up your text and frame your thesis. For

example, Alexander Weinstein’s Children of the New World is a collection of science fiction

short stories set in the near-future, “a place of both technological wonders and societal

dysfunction, eerily familiar yet jarringly alien,”1 writes Jason Heller of NPR.

After you’ve introduced your text (and not necessarily in a separate paragraphs), state

your thesis: In this paper I argue that the omission of futuristic technology in “Heartland”—the

one and only short story within Children to have such a stark exclusion—is a useful rhetorical

device that blurs the lines between science fiction and realism grounded in environmental

disaster and class struggle, the likes of which can be seen unfolding in real-time across the

United States today. I will then connect key plot points of “Heartland” to the environmental and

financial hardships of families dealing with both the 2017 and 2018 Pacific Northwest forest

fires that still, at the time of this writing, remain ablaze today; as Matt Stevens at The New York

Times reports in September of 2017, “The [Pacific Northwest] blazes have forced evacuations

and prompted the governor of Washington to declare a state of emergency.”2 And Samantha

Dooley, from The Boston Globe, who reported in August of this year that the “fires raging in

Northern California and British Columbia is impacting skies as far away as New England.”3

While the above paragraph is one example of how you might open your paper—introduce

1 Jason Heller, “’Children Of The New World’ Aims a Cautionary Eye At Our Technological Future,” NPR 2 Matt Stevens, “Pacific Northwest Fires Smother Region in Smoke and Ash,” The New York Times, 09/16/2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/us/wildfires-oregon-washington.html 3 Samantha Dooley, “Smoke From Pacific Northwest is causing haze over New England,” The Boston Globe, 08/24/2018, https://www.boston.com/news/weather/2018/08/24/smoke-from-the-pacific-northwest-is- causing-a-visible-haze-over-new-england

Last, First LCS121-XX

Word Count: XXXX your text and then your thesis—I’d like you to take note about a few key points: because we’re

concerned with clarity, economy, and precision of writing over cleverness and poetics, begin

your thesis statement with first-person clarity: E.g., “In this paper I argue that...” followed by “I

will do so by...” (as seen above). When referencing or citing a short story, like Weinstein’s

“Heartland,” be sure to place quotation marks around the title; when referencing or citing a full

work, like Weinstein’s Children of the New World or Shelley’s Frankenstein, use italics. When

quoting directly from a text (e.g., “We’re sitting around the table eating cheerios...”4) be sure to

also cite appropriately. And when a direct passage takes up four or more lines, use block quotes:

The boy was strapped into the capsule, his hands secured, and he looked out at us. He spoke then, for the first and only time that night. He asked if he might have one of his pencils with him; it was in his pencil box, he said, the one with a brown bear for an eraser. The principal assured him that he wouldn’t need it in outer space, and the custodian noted that the request was moot; the boy’s desk had been emptied earlier that day. So they closed the cover. All we could see was the smudge of the boy’s face pressed against the porthole.5

Make sure to follow your direct quotes with additional commentary and analysis; for example, if

you were to include the above passage from “Rocket Night” you would then have to unpack its

content for your reader—remember, “the reader cannot read your mind.”6

Academic resources, too, require appropriate citation and framing. For example,

according to scholar Brian Attebery, “Science fiction is often concerned with the ways in which

cultures interact, most obviously in stories of first contact or interplanetary warfare.”7

4 Alexander Weinstein, “Saying Goodbye to Yang,” Children of the New World, (Picador, New York, NY, 2016), 1. 5 Weinstein, “Rocket Night,” 180. 6 Bryan A. Garner and David Foster Wallace, Quack this way: David Foster Wallace & Bryan A. Garner talk language and writing (RosePen Books, 2013) 35.

7 Brian Attebery. "Aboriginality in Science Fiction." Science Fiction Studies 32, no. 3 [97] (November 2005): 385-405. MLA International Bibliography, EBSCOhost (accessed October 1, 2017), 385.

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Word Count: XXXX From his 2005 publication “Aboriginality in Science Fiction” in the journal Science Fiction

Studies, Attebery continues, “By allowing writers to dramatize negotiations among radically

differing world-views and ways of life, the genre becomes what Mary Louise Pratt calls an ‘art

of the contact zone.’”8 (Note the single quotation marks around the Pratt quote.)

If you need further assistance surrounding Turabian style of citation or MLA (if that’s

your preference) please see the resources I’ve provided in the Google Drive. Also, as always,

feel free to stop by my office hours, ACE, or the library for help.

8 Attebery, 385