Horror, Fantasy, Sci-fi

Also known as "Why haven't I listened to these before?" Personally, I love the radio show more than the book now. I read the book for the first time within the past year and I loved Douglas Adams’ writing. And I’ve been wanting to read the rest of his series. Listening to the radio was like reading this story with a new light because now you can hear and experience how the story was meant to sound like and I really appreciate the feel and humor that they were able to put into this show.   Hitchhiker’s Guide has this flow to it that I’ve noticed in reading the book. I hear it even on the radio show where the story just flows from scene to scene, and there’s this energy to it that brings the story to life. I got to about episode four in the twelve part series and I noticed that it’s already getting close to the end of the first book (I believe, I just remember Magrathea was towards the end of Hitchhiker’s). I wasn’t sure at the beginning of listening to the radio

The Distance of the Moon is a visual and imaginative experience. The descriptive detail of how the scene works with the moon literally coming close to the moon was breathtaking. At first, I had to reread the beginning multiple times, because with literary work it’s hard for me to understand whether anything being said was literal or just metaphorical. But once I got a grasp of the story and the language, I saw the moon in a new way. A surreal landscape where the ocean and surface of the moon meet and the two environments collide.   What I love about this short story is that even though this strange lunar phenomenon was occurring, we saw an unrequited love story unfold. Every character had a desire—yearning for something just out of reach. The deaf one was the only one who took full advantage of the situation and leaped across the moon.   The language of the story feels like it’s meant for a children’s picture book. I looked up the short story and found animated storyte

For cyberpunk, I watched the animated film Paprika. Truly a mindfuck. I love anime films like Akira and Perfect Blue that really twist the realms of reality and take that weirdness dial and crank it up to eleven. Paprika is no different. This film perfectly blurs the lines between reality and dreams. I’m more surprised that I’ve never watched this before.   A motif I found in this movie was that things were always in motion. Even the more mundane and expository scenes such as the scientists talking is shown in motion, with them walking down the hallway and not having this conversation simple in an office. The information is given concisely with no loss of movement. And while yes, there are still scenes. This movie is full of seamless transitional scenes where a moving scene quickly goes from the real world to the dream realm.   I was talking about cyberpunk as a genre to a friend of mine, and he argued that cyberpunk meant it needed to have robots in it. And yes, that

What interested me about Babel 17 going into it, was the idea that language can be used as a weapon. This is such a unique and interesting concept, and a bit surreal to think about. It’s a little unnerving when you try to wrap your head around it.   Babel 17 is almost like profiling. You read every change in facial expressions and body languages to see what the person is thinking about or what their emotions are. Just like behavior science, it’s rating body language, predicting what someone is thinking and feeling, but with the added ability to predict events like a psychic ability.   I’m curious about how the system Babel 17 works. I know the point isn’t to know, but how knowing the language allow you to predict an impending attack at a port? Unless further in the novel it sets up more rules for Babel 17 (which I’m sure it does) then I don’t get the whole scope of how this language is actually being used as a weapon. I’m imagining it to be similar to how the force wor

Having seen the movie before reading the book, I was surprised to find that the movie was pretty faithful to the reading. The book has more details, including specific scientific facts, but otherwise, it’s faithful.   It’s funny how close we are as a society to this scenario becoming possible. There’s already plans in motion to put people on the Mars, though I don’t know how many years that’ll actually take. This novel illustrates what a worst case scenario would look like. In this novel, even though a lot goes wrong, I feel there are a lot of little minor miracles that happen in order to achieve getting Mark home. If we did actually did leave a man on Mar, I’d hope we’d learn from this novel to make sure there’s a plenty of options to continue surviving on Mars. Especially with Mars’ wind storms being so brutal, we’d have to have build something that’s super durable and doesn’t fall apart.   When I think Space Opera, I didn’t believe this would fall under this genre.

I read Good Omens for this weeks Neil Gaiman read. I don’t know much about biblical mythology but I’m loving the combination of humor and mythology teaching in this novel. You don’t have to understand it to enjoy reading it, and I’m sure if you did know it’d be that much funnier to read.   Good Omens is incredibly entertaining and it’s definitely a book I’ll finish reading during the summer. (Along with a good number of these other books from this semester.) Even though this week was focused on Neil Gaiman, I think this duo-authored book emphasizes on both of their writing talents.   The worldbuilding with all the demons is great. Having the demons treated to a more modern society really pulls out the Urban Fantasy aspect of Gaiman’s works. And along with the humorous parts of the story, everything feels weirdly nonchalant. As if characters just know whats going on at all times, or at least they don’t care all that much because they know they have no free will of thei

1) What is your reaction to the piece? I've read this piece before in a different class. My reaction to it then was more or less disgust. After discussing it in class, I understood what all the elements were in the story but the process of being an N'Tlic was still horrifying. Having to become a host to parasitic larva, for a species that's basically enslaved humanity. It's a surreal piece, about what would happen if humans weren't the dominating race. What I liked about this story was that every human character had a different reaction to the process of being chosen. Han wanted to be chosen, the mother wanted nothing to do with it, Qui was completely against it, and Gan had slight resentment to it but still accepted being impregnated. 2) What connections did you make with the story that you read? The theme of this story is childbirth--but with an alien twist. It explores childbirth, and what possibilities there are if men had to be the child-bearers. In this,