Literature of Horror, Fantasy, Science Fiction

Come to Venus Melancholy

For this week, I read the short story Come to Venus Melancholy by Thomas M. Disch. The story had quite a bit of dark tones to it, as well as taking some time to understand. I think the element of surprise was something that played a big part in this story. Something that appears to be so normal, so close to what we know, can be the complete opposite. In this story, in the beginning, I thought that the character was monologuing about their life. The element of surprise here is that the "her" is a cyborg of sorts, that used to be a human, but is now a computer in a house. The second surprise is that the environment of the swamp isn't from planet Earth, it's on planet Venus. The final surprise was the cyborg's confession of both love and craziness. This was quite a short read and an interesting perspective since it's told from the cyborg's point of view. I feel like in many of these stories there is often a hero, and the story is narrated from that hero's...

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

For this week I read Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane . I really enjoyed this short novel and the underlying themes that went along with it. Some of the things I noticed were the revealing of reality and how it is never as it seems, comparison of adulthood versus childhood, and the idea of other universes. The one theme that I want to mention and expand on is the idea that every person or being has a different side to them, that is not outwardly visible. In the father's case, it seemed that he was being controlled by the "flea" Ursula Monkton and almost drowned his son in the bathtub. This makes you wonder - did the evil person/creature make him do this or was there something evil and resenting in him the entire time? With the main antagonist, Ursula Monkton, she is an evil creature from another world that entered the world that we know it, disguised as a human. This provides some interesting perspective, that sometimes the evilest traits and experiences...

Mona Lisa Overdrive

Discuss the types of reality rendered in the works you read and watched for this week's assignment. Describe the effects of this reality on the narrative and the implications for the presumed reader. Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson is a multi-narrative science fiction novel that takes place in what seems like the distant future. Like many other novels of this genre, the reader is thrown in without explanation and is constantly trying to keep up and figure out what's happening. While this was new and intriguing at the beginning of the novel, I found this very hard to follow throughout and stay interested in. The realities in this novel seem very convoluted and obscure, with terms like cyberspace and stims filling the scene. Every narrative in this novel has a completely different setting, and tone that for a long time in the book it seems as though they are not connected at all. I think that the effects of this technologically enhanced reality opens a lot of ideas fo...

Allyssa Ellis

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