qdixon Lit/horror

For literary speculation I chose a book I happen to just be slowly reading throughout the semester in my free time, The Martian Chronicles. While being strictly science fiction it managed take normal tropes associated with the genre and made them into something new. The format of the book is what really sets it apart from many others. The syfy short story isn’t anything new but the collection found in the Martian Chronicles work both as individual stories and as a bunch of works as a whole all centered around the slow colonization of Mars. This multi short story approach makes for quick reads that can be truly digested and then later put together without having to stop halfway through the story. Also the writing doesn’t seem to focus of scientific details but just the narrative itself. Nothing about what’s going happening on Mars is truly explained. One specific story that I liked that really stood out to me was “Night Meeting”. Basically what happens is a man

1) Firstly, I really enjoy this story as a whole; it feels refreshingly original and has an interesting gender reversal you don’t see to often.   Secondly, my skin was crawling the entire time I was reading this. I get a real face-hugger vive and, we especially discussed in class, a mental violation kind of takes place; the character’s homes and bodies are invaded by this alien that talks and threatens them into doing what it wants. 2) I kind of touched on this in my earlier response, I immediately thought of every scene in the entire Alien franchise that had to do with the face-huggers. Both the story and the Alien movies have themes of sexual assault. What’s interesting is that the gender roles reversal. 3) I think this would make for a cool syfy horror film. It would be very relevant politically to what’s happening currently and has a unique take in that genre. Of course that film would have to be lengthened to average movie times. Other changes li

The cyber punk genre directly plays with the possible transition or mixing of man and machine, along with plausible dystopian futures thrown in there as well. For that week instead of a read I decided to watch Akira.     Some stories in cyber punk have the underlying tone of man making a large evolutionary step through technology. I’ve always found this to an interesting theme and certain aspects of it are starting to present themselves in real life today. We see mechanical limbs becoming more advanced and phones becoming almost an extension of the body.   Some major examples of this are Blade Runner and Ghost in a Shell that really play into the combination of man and machine. What I like about Akira is that it goes straight into man’s next evolutionary step without having body modifications being the direct cause. It’s more future driven technology chemically transforms Tetsuo, the main character, into a telekinetic that rapidly becomes to powerful for his own

Upon hearing we’d be cover this subgenre of science fiction, fiction of ideas, I immodestly jumped into an old favorite of mine, Slaughter House Five.   This subgenre seems to avoid certain characteristics of other forms of syfy that tend to make them cornier. It instead directly tackles real world issues and imbeds them in key parts of the story. Slaughter House Five is an incoherent tale that conveys long-term effects of war. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, is forever psychologically damaged by ww2 and his imprisonment in German camps. The book itself goes in depth on how he was abducted by aliens and taken to their space zoo where he experiences time travel as a result. Billy seems to be devoid of all emotion for the entire book and I interpret these events that happen to him as his way of coping with his uninteresting life/ marriage and the horrors he experienced during the war. He gets a movie star wife while he was abducted and lives out the fantasies of