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...

Bloodchild

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 piece did not reflect the values and perspective of majoritarian culture in the ways that it was portrayed as distinctly alien, and that humans were the invaders of another planet, and that in order to survive, humans had to have relationships with alien creatures that laid eggs inside of our intestines and organs. This storyline specifically is not something that people tend to think of on an everyday basis. The young main character of the story being chosen as the one to carry the alien babies, and going back and forth on whether to go through with it or not, is ultimately somehow a little bit closer to how we think. If there is any major decision we have to make as humans, it is often dragged out and thought over the possibilities many times before finalizing anything, let alone if other people's lives are at stake. This piece does re...

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

Search This Blog