Lurie's "Something Borrowed, Something Blue"
1.  In Lurie's story, the love between a husband and a wife is threatened--albeit unsuccessfully--by the interfering "magic" of an "other woman."  What is the "magic" of the blue slip?  How does it work?  What are its effects?

2.  How are sexuality and love related as the narrator sees them?

3.  How are truth and love related as the narrator sees them?

4.  What is the narrator's attitude toward the story she tells?  Or, to put it another way, what is her motivation for sharing the story with us?

Lem's "The Fourth Sally or How Trurl Built a Femfatalatron . . ."

Note:  This story appears in a collection of stories called The Cyberiad by Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem.  All the characters in the stories, including the inventor Trurl, King Protuberon, Prince Pantagoon, etc., are robots with consciousness, sentient cybernetic beings made of steel and circuitry.  They exist in their own universe without human inventors or operators.

1.  Every genre proceeds from certain expectations in the reader.  Does science fiction lend itself to the handling of love as a theme?  Why or why not?

2.  How are sexual desire, love, and reproduction interrelated in the story?  In what sense can this story be said to be about love at all?

3.  Why does the cannonade of babies work so well?

4.  How does Lem tap the imagery and language of earlier literature on love?

5.  How does Trurl's activity in the story compare to Don Pedro's in Much Ado?  To Persky's in "The Kuglemass Episode"?  To Cleo Wolf's in Lurie's story?

6.  In light of all four stories we've read (before and after the midterm):  what sorts of things can destory love?  and how can love survive attacks by those things?