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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 point of view. I liked that this was changed up a little bit, and was told from the robots' point of view. This plays a part in what we think of machines, and how intelligent they may be. This raises questions like: can you ethically kill or destroy a robot with a human soul? Overall I liked this short story a lot for the underlying concepts as well as stirring up some interesting and deep thoughts about humanity and space.

Comments

  1. Katey StareNovember 19, 2019 at 10:48 AM

    Very interesting blog post. This short story sounds like a great read! I love stories that have elements of surprises in them!!

    ReplyDelete

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