Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams was far and wide my favorite thing about this semester. I loved listening to the radio broadcast and hear the characters come to life in front of me. The way the genre tropes were presented so comically made them clear to understand and discuss in class. I specifically enjoyed the opening of the broadcast, with the severe irony of the character's home being bulldozed, and then the Earth being bulldozed after it. After the first episode, I pondered on the creativity and original storytelling made use of in this story using science fiction as their framework. The story was great, and it got me excited to see the movie.

This class taught me more about genres than I thought was possible, but above all else it kept me reading and sane during a crazy semester of thesis projects and sleepless nights. I enjoyed the class discussions and what I took away from every class prepared me for the next one. I hope to continue in my genre study as I work to present them in children's books in the future.

Oryx and Crake: Literary Speculation

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood was a great choice to read for this week's focus, which was literary speculation. We talked about how these novels can be freeing, seeing as they can focus on certain genre tropes while remaining independent of the genre itself, but my personal opinion is that genre is a fluid thing. I think literary speculation is an important distinction solely because it is aware it is not a genre. Some of my favorite stories play off of the idea that genre can be a little of this and a little of that. Oryx and Crake represents this idea, and I think Herman Mieville encompasses it as well.

All of that being said, I wanted to discuss our prompt, which was "is this an important distinction or not?" Personally, I put less emphasis on this than our class discussion did, but I think the distinction needs to be made nonetheless. The fluidity of genre is what makes it so appealing to me, and the I think the speculative aspect of this course was finding those 'gray areas.'

Oryx and Crake in particular was a strange read that had many highlights I didn't expect. The grungy nature of the world Atwood built was original both in creation and presentation . I would recommend this novel for anyone interested in the areas of literature that are less defined and make room for some of the most creative stories.

Lilith's Brood

For this week, I read from Lilith's Brood, or more specifically Dawn, by Octavia Butler. This author and her books opened a lot of doors to interesting discussions today in class. The book explored some concepts that were not so mainstream and pretty far from comfortable, such as the idea of cross species gestation. One concept that I found to be very innovative were the Ooloi, or the author's creation of an entirely new gender. This opened a lot of doors into discussions of our own gender norm and how we treat gender in our society. In this way specifically, the book dealt with something that was not a part of majoritarian acceptance and culture (though it should be.) I think the story itself was simply astounding in terms of creativity and originality. The concept felt very grounded and the conflicts and tensions were real to the reader.
This book, as well as her short story Bloodchild that we read in class had similar themes and subject matter, though they were described in entirely different ways from one another. Being a lover of longer stories, I felt that Dawn held together a lot more for me. Above all what I got out of this week was the idea that alien invasion stories and the idea of diverse science fiction can have many more origins than I originally thought. Dawn was one of the more original concepts that I have read in this genre, and it provided a good sense of hope for the books to come that I will most certainly read.