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Week 14: Satire and Sci-Fi

Write a post about how what you read, listened to or watched for this week explores issues of the present by placing them in the context of an imagined future. For this week I listened to the first radio episode of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Since the first episode was more of an introduction to Arthur Dent and his friend Ford Prefect who turns out to be an alien and saves him from aliens when they destroy Earth. The issue presented in the episode was how a highway in the middle of an old, sleepy town and it reflects on how industrial buildings are pushing into living communities where they are not welcome. The indirect solution was the aliens just so happened to destroy Earth! The movie Downsizing more directly addressed issues of the present, which is that the environment and Earth is being destroyed because of human waste. However, instead of cutting down on waste or creating alternatives for packaging etc, they choose to downsize the problem...which creates other
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Week 13: Literary Speculation

This week we are attempting to distinguish between writing in genre and writing that may use elements of genre but that is essentially literary. Discuss this question in relation to the work(s) you read for this week. Do you think this is an important or necessary distinction, or not? Is your experience of the text affected by these questions? This week I read the short story, The Distance of the Moon by Italo Calvino. Whilst I read this story, I realized that it was a mixture of science fiction, fantasy but also prose. The structure, the descriptive and flowery language as well as the topic of the short story reminded me of poetry. If this piece was condensed, I could definitely see it as a piece of poetry. The genre of fantasy was most apparent as the narrator discusses traveling to the moon easily by "rowing out to sea" then climbing up the moon and collecting "moon milk" which almost resembled cheese. It also recounts how the narrator, Qfwfq, fell in love wit
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Assessment

1. What is your reaction to the text you just read? Whilst reading Bloodchild by Octavia Butler, I was confused and mildly disgusted as the story unfolded. From what I understand of the plot, the human race has been taken over by insect-like creatures and the character T'Gatoi is the insect creature that stays with the main character, Gan's, family. These insect like creatures lay their eggs in a human and the humans act as an incubator of sorts for their babies. The part that most disturbed me was when T'Gatoi cut open Lomas' body in order to get rid of the grubs that were eating him inside out. I was also highly disturbed when T'Gatoi "impregnated" Gan with her eggs, as I am unsure of how that happens since from what I know, Gan is a male. The story is vague with the act of the impregnation, but nevertheless it is disturbing that it is on the borderline of being an act of rape against an adolescent. Initially, when Gan describes "sipping" eggs
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Week 12: Diverse Position Science Fiction

Discuss how the text(s) you read for this week's assignment did or did not reflect the values and perspectives of majoritarian culture.  This week I read the short story I Live With You by Carol Emshwiller. The narrator doesn't give the reader an indication of who they are, leaving us to wonder if they are an actual human being, or some ghost or spiritual entity. Throughout the entire story, we are given a glimpse into the narrator's life and perspective as someone who is not "seen" by the world, as well as the life of the woman (whose house the narrator stays at, unbeknownst to the woman). As the audience, we understand that both the woman and the narrator are lonely people, and are segregated or ignored by majority of society because of a unnamed aspect. Whilst reading, I assumed that this aspect that they shared was race. They might have been a minority living in a location with a small population of that minority. Thinking about it now, making this assumpt
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Week 11: Cyberpunk and Steampunk

Discuss the types of reality rendered in the works you read and watched for this week's assignment. Describe the effects of these reality on the narrative and the implications for the presumed reader. This week I read the short story Fragments of a Hologram Rose by William Gibson. The story revolves around Parker, a man whose relationship recently ended with a woman named Angela.  He copes by using sense recordings called ASP in order to sleep at night. He lives in a dystopian America, where major cities in the country have fallen into ruin. He replays Angela's "tape" of her sensory perceptions, which allows him to experience and see things that Angela did, and experiences part of her trip to Greece. Through this story the most obvious reality that has been rendered is the ASP. I imagined the ASP experience of viewing other people's sensory perceptions to be like the Pensieve from Harry Potter, where people can store their memories and have others watch them. T
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Week 10: The Fiction of Ideas

What ideas or mind experiments were explored in the works you read for this week? What were some of the implications or consequences of those ideas for those of us living today? In Samuel R. Delaney's Babel-17 , the novel I read for this week, the plot surrounds Rydra Wong, a famous poet in multiple galaxies and has linguistic talents. She is recruited by the government to decipher an alien code that turns out to be an entire language that she is desperate to learn more about. The ideas of language and communication is explored in Delaney's work as Rydra explains that one made up word can have a long and complicated meaning and discusses how there might not be a word to describe an exact feeling or meaning. This translates to modern culture as words do not translate directly or with the same emotion into another language. Sometimes it takes away the full meaning or expressiveness of the term. Being trilingual myself, even I struggle with translating certain terms into another
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Week 9: Space Opera

Post a response to what you read this week discusses what elements from other genre have been used in the work you read.  This week, I read No Woman Born by C.L. Moore. The plot focuses on a singer/actress/dancer Deirdre who was almost killed in a fire, and saved by a scientist who transfers her brain into a golden mechanical body so that she can speak, dance and sing just as she could as a human. This results in a female cyborg of sorts, who has no face and no expressions, but sounds and moves just as Deirdre had. This short story reminded me of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley with its "gothic" aspects, although it leans more towards science fiction rather than the horror genre of Frankenstein. I believe this is a modern and futuristic retelling of the story of Frankenstein as the audience is able to easily fine parallels between the two stories. One of the gothic aspects of Frankenstein (that I discussed in an earlier blog post) was that it introduced the monster or supernatu
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