Rumpelstilzchen/Spoilers

I remember reading “The House of the Scorpion” when I was in middle school, and after re-reading it over the long break, I was kind of confused.  It seemed like I had read an entirely different novel years ago.  This was the first real “sci-fi” novel I had ever read, and it was for class in 7th grade.
This go around, it read like a fairytale.  Not one with a happy ending or a moral, but something from “Kinder- und Hausmärchen,” also known as Grimm’s Fairytales, specifically “Rumplestiltzskin.”  Matteo is locked in a room (incidentally, covered in straw), awaiting his fate, not unlike the miller’s daughter in “Rumplestiltzskin.”  The child in the fairytale is promised to Rumplestiltzskin in exchange for spinning straw into gold, but the queen is able to thwart his plan and keep her child.
A ton of pretty obvious parallels between the two, but I think they’re necessary for some young adults to read science fiction.  The familiarity makes difficult subjects/social commentary much more user friendly.

I know I have t…

I know I have this backwards (sorry Sample, Jambrose) but I think its better this way.
            Reading through Blindsight, I was unimpressed with the “imagine you are Siri Keeton” passages.  They read as tedious, and sort of like those “choose your own adventure” novels, but less entertaining and with more summarization.  So with this assignment, I wanted to see if my attitude towards these passages would change with the POV.

 

I am Siri Keeton:

I awoke in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days. I could feel my blood, syrupy with dobutamine and leuenkephalin, forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. My body inflated in painful increments: blood vessels dilate; flesh peeled apart from flesh; ribs cracked in my ears with sudden unaccustomed flexion. My joints had seized up through disuse. I was a stick-man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae.

I would have screamed if I had the breath.

Vampires did this all the time, I remembered. It was normal for them; it was their own unique take on resource conservation. They could have taught our kind a few things about restraint, if that absurd aversion to right-angles hadn’t done them in at the dawn of civilization. Maybe they still can. They’re back now, after all— raised from the grave with the voodoo of paleogenetics, stitched together from junk genes and fossil marrow steeped in the blood of sociopaths and high-functioning autistics. One of them commands this very mission. A handful of his genes live on in my own body so it too can rise from the dead, here at the edge of interstellar space. Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire.

            In matching up the point of view with this passage with the rest of the novel, I tried to tell myself that it was more organic this way, but I ended up hating it even more.