Week Fourteen Writing Assignment

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

No matter how many times I’ve read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and it has been a few times now, it never fails in inducing endless laughter and joy. To me, it was a childhood staple and every few years I enjoy re-reading it over again. With this novel, Douglas Adams brought life to a phenomenon that I believe will outlive being a popular fad. This is science fiction made as a vehicle of laughter. It pokes fun at the genre while honoring its tradition, but it is much more than that. The humor is stemming from sociology, philosophy, and of course science. It’s not just slapstick comedy for young readers. Beneath the surface of utter hilarity, Adams used sarcasm and wit to make some rather poignant statements about life and the manner in which we are going about living it. This is one reason the book is so appropriate for multiple readings. You will understand things you did not the first time around because of the author’s subtle, ideas and approach to writing. The story is explains how things become even trickier for main character when he discovers the great usefulness of sticking a Babel fish into his ear and then meets the singular President of the Galaxy Zaphod Beeblebrox and his shipmate Trillian, both of whom Arthur actually met months before at a party. Impossible coincidences are explained by the fact that Beeblebrox's ship is runs on the new Infinite Improbability Drive. Dent grows more and more confused during his travels on board the Heart of Gold, and the story eventually culminates with an amazing visit to an astronomically improbability of the world.

It is difficult to describe the humor and the equally humorous characters. Arthur Dent, who basically has no idea what is going on; Ford Prefect, Arthur's remarkable friend from Betelgeuse; Zaphod Beeblebrox, with his two heads, three arms, and arrogant attitude; Trillian the charming Earth girl who basically flies the Heart of Gold; Slartibartfast the planet builder and fjord-make extraordinaire; and Marvin the eternally depressed robot. Life-"loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it" is the Paranoid Android's philosophy. One brilliant thing that Adams does is to step away from the action every so often to present interesting facts about the universe as recorded in the Hitchhiker's Guide; here we learn about Vogon poetry, the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, Trans Galactic Gargle Blasters, and other intriguing pieces about life in the wild universe Adams created. He even gives the reader the ultimate answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything in between.

Week Thirteen Writing Assignment

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

When delving into the work of speculative, science fiction by Margaret Atwood there are two major themes seen in Oryx and Crake that I grafted to immediately. First, the novel takes place in the distant future, where global warming has changed the Earth as we knew it so much that coastal cities no longer exist due to sea level rise. Temperatures are so high that going out in the sun is a death sentence for the common human, so more affluent areas wealthier areas of the world are protection from the sun. In the sheer setting and landscape Atwood presents this is a very possible potential climate and landscape for the world to exist in at the rate we humans pollute and do nothing to prevent and preserve what we have for our future generations. This is a huge issue for me, so I was immediately drawn into the novel before we really had a strong development of the characters.

The second major theme is the relationship between the three main characters. Snowman (Jimmy) the narrator, who at the start of the book is revealed to be the only known surviving human being on the face of the planet barely alive, roaming amongst genetically engineered creatures.

While trying to stay alive, Snowman keeps watch over a group of human-like creatures called the ‘crakers’, named after his "best" friend Crake, who was responsible for the creation of these people. These Crakers are supposedly the ‘ideal’ humans. They have no emotions, no sex drives (other than to procreate), they do not eat meat and are a very simplistic human-like form and Snowman promised to care for them. As Snowman reflects on the past, we discover more about Crake and Oryx, pompous, yet brilliant man who had wanted to better the world. Oryx, a woman whose history takes is dark and bleak stemming from being exploited through child pornography as some type of servitude, and eventually becomes a prostitute as an adult. Crake hires her, and the story becomes twisted as both Crake and Snowman both fall for her Oryx. However she really only had feelings for Snowman and their twisted love triangle leading up to the world’s end. their lopsided relationship that leads us to answers of the world's end.

The imagery and horrors Atwood imagines of the future may seem bleak, but they have a strong potential to become reality. What I found most important was how introspective I became while reading into my human history and the damage that it has done to the planet. We as Americans are living way beyond our means, our planets means; it can’t support 7 billion of humans let alone a growing population. I found it that Oryx and Crake really pushes one to think about how the future could be, or how their own futures could be. It’s terrifying and depressing but the truth.

Week Twelve Writing Assignment

Octavia Butler's Kindred

For this week’s reading I chose to take on Kindred by Octavia Butler. While I reading I found myself getting even more immersed in the story and characters than I did with other science fictions novels and short stories we have read in class. The only apparent reason I could think of as to why this novel was an easier read than Butler’s other works was because it wasn’t steeped in heavy science fiction vocabulary that is challenging to pronounce, and Butler's writing was simple and straightforward. She moved the reader through the story quickly making it nearly impossible for the reader to put down.

The novel introduces a character named Dana, a black woman living in Los Angeles in 1976, who has unwillingly time travelled to 1815 to save the life of a young boy in Maryland's. It turns out this boy, Rufus, is one of her ancestors white slave owner’s son. Dana continues to be pulled into time travel back to this plantation where the more she travels back in time the longer she stays and the only way she can get back to the present day is if she is a life threatening situation. In the time she travels to the plantation she is forced to live the life of a slave; being whipped and beaten and nearly raped twice. Even being forced to watch other slaves be whipped and families destroyed. Somehow she finds solace in the hard work, and it becomes an escape from the horrors of slave life as she watches as the small son of a plantation owner (Rufus) grows up to be a cruel, evil, volatile slave owner and to be her great-grandfather many generations removed.

Kindred is about slavery and the scars it has left on American society cloaked in a science fiction novel. Butler’s very open and accurate portrayal of the physical, emotional and psychological abuse inflicted on innocent lives really made me personally, feel like a kindred spirit with the characters in the novel, though I could never truly relate. Something I never understood why in the novel, Dana was from present day (1976) so why would she even help Rufus at all? Especially when he became older she came to his defense when he committed heinous and terrible acts, but I did notice a truly redeeming theme in the novel. It’s setting in Maryland, where the famed Frederick Douglass was once a slave. Being a history buff, I picked up on the fact that Butler chose the setting as a place where the slaves could realistically potentially escape. The novel is aimed toward young adults, so it did not get too involved in the gore and brutality though part of me wish it did, because it was the reality of the situation and it was a moderately quick novel to read.

Week Eleven Writing Assignment

Snow Crash

This week’s reading of Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson we were plunged into the futuristic, anarcho-capitalist society where government no longer regulates and humans “plug in” to the Metaverse, an evolution of the internet where people exist through avatars. There is new drug being pedaled at called “snow crash” that affects the users in both the Metaverse and the physical, human world.  The protagonist, Hiro, uses his skill and delves into the drawing on ancient human history of Sumerian culture and linguistics.
Personally, I did not enjoy this story. I thought it was it was exhausting and overly complicated textual information. I found it difficult to get through a few pages before getting overwhelmed by all the constant flow of new information being introduced. For example, as if appropriating all of Sumerian culture for the purposes of this story was not enough, Stephenson then wrote about the story from the Bible, the Tower of Babel in a different context pliable to his novel.  The linguistic comparisons seemed adequate enough, but everything else soon felt ancillary. Do I even have to mention how ridiculous the Cult of Asherah is?  (A cult of prostitutes spreading the virus “snow crash” to orphaned infants through breast milk.) It was even compared to the herpes virus. I found it useless to the overall context of the story.
Overall, I thought the original concept of the novel at a glance seemed interesting, but after reading it I was overwhelmed by its overcomplicated and plot. The novel reminded me of the film, The Matrix, but in this story, the humans in the physical world could plug in or out and were aware there were inside of the Metaverse. I thought it was noteworthy how the author decided to make a type of evil virus based on ancient Sumerian linguistic and pull content from human history.