LITERATURE OF HORROR, FANTASY & SCI-FI

Week 1: Frankenstien by Mary Shelly (#6 points) Week 2: Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice (#6 points) Week 3: A Wild Sheep Chase (#6 points) Week 3_1: Confessions by Kanae Minato (#5 points) Week 4: Annihilation (#6 points) Week 6: The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (#6 points) Week 7: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (#6 points) Week Eight: Contemporary Fantasy - Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Suzanna Clark (# 6 points) Week Nine: New Frontier - The Martian by Andrew Weir (# 5 points) Week Ten: The Fiction of Ideas - The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuinn (# 5 points) Week Eleven: Cyberpunk and Steampunk - Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (# 6 points) Week Thirteen: Literature and Speculation - Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (# 6 points) Week Fourteen: Speculative Satire - Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (# 6 points) Week Fifteen: Future Tense - Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (# 5 points)  Total Point from reading: 80 Attendance: 13 < 2 absence...

  This week, I read Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. Overall, It was hard to read because there are a lot of characters in a story. The relationships between the characters keep increasing and get complicated, so sometimes it was a bit hard to follow the story. The view of the world and the characters the writer created are very fresh and unfamiliar as well. The new words like Fleet, Ancillaries, Nilt, and Radch pop up from the first page of this novel. At first, I needed time to get used to this new world, but at some point, I found myself empathizing with the speaker and experiencing the vast universe.  A first-person narrator of this story is artificial intelligence, Breq, who still thinks that there are a lot of incomprehensible behaviors humans do, although it has been living 19 years with a human body. Breq must follow the command of her creator, the Radch’s monarch,  but by a series of events, now she acts by her own free will. It can be read just as the er...

  A huge joke on a cosmic scale!  I think if I define Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in one sentence, it seems like this can be said. The book is full of humor and jokes. The author is expressing his ingenious imagination regardless of any form and authority. In this book, things like the logical rationale and the probability of the story are not important. Unlike hard Science Fiction, which elaborately unfolds a story based on scientific theory, the charm of this book lies in the writer’s imagination and humor. As we can see from the setting that the Earth is a supercomputer designed by a super-intelligent race, the book shows the adventure of countless unique people and events between space and Earth, and prehistoric times and 5.6 trillion years later.    Even the most entertaining jokes can get tired after hours of listening. To keep laughing and induce fun, we need a narrative device that will arouse the readers’ curiosity and tension...

     The world behind Oryx and Crake is quite familiar to us. Environmental pollution has destroyed a significant part of nature, and animals and plants are facing extinction every moment. Humans acquired innovative technology and science, and continuously create new life forms and try to modify our bodies to obtain youth and eternal life through genetic manipulation. The novel begins with the human, Homo Sapiens nearing extinction, and the story reveals the reason why the human reached extinction by following the only human Snowman's story.     The thing that caught my eyes was the game called ‘Extinctathon’. The writer continues to try new word combinations and constantly gives characters and objects nicknames like Oryx, Crake, and Snowman. I feel like the writer used this book as a kind of an encyclopedia for extinct things. To record and remember raccoon, skunk, wolf, dog, pig, cormorant, Oryx and Crake, the author chose combined names of pre-existing n...

  The shock of using VR devices for the first time is still unforgettable. It’s still a little closer to the virtual side than to the real one, but it was still amazing. Since then, I have been interested in virtual reality and augmented reality, and have started to read related articles and books. It was difficult to fully understand, but I was convinced that the technology would gradually focus on making virtual realities more realistic. VR appeared in the mid-2010s, but there was someone who came up with this concept 20 years before this. It’s Neal Stephenson, the writer of ‘Snow Crash’, and the novel ’Snow Crash’ is a book that enables us to approach the world of virtual reality more easily.  Considering this book was published in 1992, I’m really surprised that the story described in this novel is almost close to the world right now, where a lot of Internet-related technologies have made remarkable development. ‘Metaverse’ the virtual place that the comput...

The story is science fiction that unfolds with the people who don’t live on Earth, but I think <The Left Hand of Darkness> tells about humans, ourselves. Many emotional exchanges take place and narratives unfold in this story.  Ursula K. LeGuinn’s <The Left Hand of Darkness> was quite difficult to read at first. It’s a total of 20 chapters, and each chapter is a mixture of the story in first-person and in the third person. Even in the first-person story, the speaker ‘I’ is Genly Ai, and in some cases it was Estraven, so it took some time to figure out who this was. For example, ‘I’ in Chapters 1, 3, 5, and 8 is Genly Ai, but ‘I’ in Chapters 6 and 10 is Estraven. The report, written by an investigator in Ekumen’s research team, explained the characteristics of the people on the Winter planet, and helped me to understand the overall framework.  The Gethenians in the novel have no sex. Their sex changes every 26 days. The protagonist boy Genly Ai visits Ge...

  I watched the movie ‘Martian’ first before I read this book. I saw the interesting fact about this novel that the writer, Andy Weir, was not a writer and he dabbled in writing a novel while he was working as a computer programmer. He published ‘Martian’ at his own expense to share the story with his friends, and as his novel has become more famous, he got a contract with a publisher, and his novel was made into a film, Martian. I really enjoyed the movie as well, so I was curious about Martian as a novel.  Mars, a planet that ordinary people cannot visit, and this environment setting is quite attractive and attracts the readers. In addition to this, the starting point of this story, losing one of the operators, Mark Watney, due to a sudden sand storm when returning from the mission, is enough to stimulate the interest.  The most impressive scene in this work is the words Mark Watney speaks at the beginning of the work, “I’m pretty much fucked. That’s my cons...

  Jonathan Strange and. Mr. Norrell is a fantasy novel that is very realistic to call it fantasy.    The background of the story is England, so that made me compare this story with Harry Potter, while I read it. In Harry Potter, the theme of magic and wizard was expressed in a more unrealistic and imaginary way, but in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, two characters who can do real magic were actively engaged in real-life events like the war between Great Britain and France, and the real historical figure like Napoleon appears in the story, so the writer combines the history of the United Kingdom and the magical world. It’s like the history of the magical world that the writer created flows away with the real history of England. And I think this makes me feel like the magic in this story could be possible or exist.    Featuring wizards and fairies, this work tells a very dark and fantastic story, and, of course, it is fiction. However, the author do...