Lok Yiu Louise Fung

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...

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...

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...

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...