Lok Yiu Louise Fung

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

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