Directions
:
Read the passages on the following pages (a definition of hubris and an excerpt from H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds). You may use the margins to take notes as you read and scrap paper to plan your response.
Your Task:
After you have read the passages, write a unified essay arguing whether hubris does or does not appear in the science fiction from our course so far.
In your essay, use ideas from the passages and from the science fiction studied in our course so far.
Using evidence from Wells and from at least one of our movies, develop your controlling idea.
Guidelines:
Be sure to
1. Use ideas from both passages and from at least one movie to establish a controlling idea about hubris in the science fiction studied in our course so far
2. Use specific and relevant evidence from our literature to develop your controlling idea
3. Organize your ideas in a logical and coherent manner
4. Use language that communicates ideas effectively
5. Follow the conventions of standard written English
You will have two class hours to write this essay. You will turn your draft in to your teacher at the end of each class.
Hubris:
The ancient Greeks recognized that some people are so self-confident that they bring about their own downfall. The Greeks called that characteristic “hubris,” which means “overbearing pride or presumption; arrogance,” and “excessive pride” (<dictionary.com>).
The War of the Worlds
by H. G. Wells [1898]
But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be
inhabited? . . . Are we or they Lords of the
World? . . . And how are all things made for man?--
KEPLER (quoted in The Anatomy of Melancholy)
[Kepler, early in the 1600’s, was one of the first astronomers to show mathematically that Copernicus was right: the earth is not the center of the universe.]
BOOK ONE
THE COMING OF THE MARTIANS
CHAPTER ONE
THE EVE OF THE WAR
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.
Wells, H. G. "The War of the Worlds." The Project Gutenberg EBook of The War of the Worlds. 1 Oct. 2004. Project Gutenberg. 17 Dec. 2005 <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/36/36.txt >.
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