Wildest Things (scifi,horror,& fantasy)

For this week I read Vintage Season by CL Moore, and re-watched the first episode of Firefly. I was pleasantly surprised by Vintage Season. At first, the main character Oliver was easy to identify with (something I find hard in science fiction sometimes)--watching with trepidation as a group of unwanted strangers move into his house with him. At first I thought he was just antisocial, but later we find out it's because some other fancy stranger had offered him a lot of money to buy his house, after he'd already agreed to lease it to these strangers. I also began to lose interest in him as a character when it showed how he thought of his fiance as more of a nuisance, and how he had no qualms about flirting and getting to be "alone" with one of his tenants. A lot of the beginning of the book is spent describing the visitors--they're too perfect, moving with precision and dressed in glamorous shape-forming clothes. I was surprised with the direction this story took

For this topic, I wasn't super enticed by the books on the course list, but there was a book in my personal reading pile that I'd been wanting to pick up for a while that fit this category, so I read that instead. And then I read the sequel. And the third and the fourth. And now it's one of my favorite series. The first book is Cinder by Marissa Meyer. The short synopsis honestly had me a bit wary at first: a retelling of cinderella, but she's a cyborg. I was worried it would be cheesy. Cinderella was definitely not my favorite fairytale growing up, and I've always struggled to get into science fiction stories. The characters in this story are so strong, however, and the world building is so solid that I was instantly swept away. It takes place on a post-apocalyptic earth, (probably?) thousands of years from now. Cinder is a teenager living in New Beijing--after World War IV, all of the Asian countries merged to form a single empire, as did a few other continen

"We're still fighting our way up from the neo-puritan reaction to the sex freedom of the twentieth century." This week we read Aye and Gomorrah in class. It's a short story by Samuel R Delaney about Spacers (people who were castrated at a young age so they wouldn't feel the effects of radiation when they were sent out to work in space, and so they are both genders and also genderless) and their offhanded search for "frelks"(people who fetishize spacers). This story was written in 1967, and explores the spectrums of gender and sexuality.  The way the story was written was interesting in that it doesn't offer much in explanation of the world and history--you're thrown right in, and most of what you learn is from context clues. All show, no tell. From the line I quoted earlier, there's a strong implication that the twentieth century in this world was a time of increasing sexual freedom (not that it wasn't in our world, but the story was w

What is your reaction to the text you just read? Bloodchild was a very interesting read. Octavia Butler did well with normalizing the grotesque and obscene. I was fascinated and involved enough with the story to keep reading through and to want to know more about the characters and the Tilc, even though the back of my mind stayed horrified and revolted by what was happening. I liked the subtle revealing of the world--how it starts without introduction, but after reading through it information is given in a way that is relevant to what's happening in the story. What connections did you make with the story that you read? Discuss the elements of the work with which you were able to connect I didn't feel connected to any of the characters per say, but I was able to understand them. Outside of this text, it's hard to imagine ever living peacefully with parasitic reptilian(or insectile?) aliens, but Bloodchild explores what it might be like if you grew up in a world like th