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. 

Akin,

Don’t get kidnapped.

Lilith

ALIENS

The most alien thing Lilith has to deal with is the lack of humans she’s come in contact with.  In class, we had a lot of people commenting that they assumed “Lilith’s Brood” was some sort of vampire book or some other supernatural characters of some sort would be opposite Lilith.   She’s put in surprisingly human situations, or at least situations that the reader is familiar with, but without humans.  This can probably be attributed to the fact that her race was studied by the Oankali prior to her capture. She’s forced into familiar situations, but seems to be the most distraught by her inability to come in contact with her fellow humans.

stink boss

We3 gives me weird, battle royaley vibes. Lost animals given biomechanic weapons and forced to fight their own kind.  Sure, its been done before, but, for some reason, audiences are always more sympathetic to animals.  The animals are made into monstrous robots, with similar qualities to Frankenstien’s monster.  Limited speech, creepy bodies and a rather nauseating effect all contribute to this comparison.  1,2, and 3 are just looking to go home and are misunderstood and forced to fight animals and humans alike.  We3 comes off as a little more obvious version of Frankenstien.  When you give commonly domesticated voices and a conflict, its more likely to draw out emotions than an angsty swiss scientist.  I think part of the reason why this graphic novel has been so successful is because animals are used as a vehicle to send as message.

Response to Ashley

Getting Lost in Neuromancer

This was supposed to be posted in ashley’s comments, but that pesky spam filter outsmarted me.

Totally agree with you, Ashley.  I have a hard time completely immersing myself into the Neuromancer universe as well, mostly due to questions and conundrums regarding the technology in the novel.  For example, Molly’s glasses/goggles.  When/if ever Molly cries, do they fill up with her tears like goggles in a swimming pool, obscuring her vision and thus defeating their entire purpose?  I find myself continually going off on mental tangents, trying to resolve the thousands of questions that the book poses.  Not that the novel isn’t highly entertaining, I think it just takes a little longer to process the information, something that was sort of unexpected when I began reading it this past week.  I began this course with the presumption that science fictions novels were hardly academic, and have already realized that I was very, very, wrong.

More parallels

I was really fascinated by both these short stories, more specifically “Who Goes There?”  Both John Carpenter’s novella and Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstien” are really ahead of their time.  I know that phrase is often tossed around, and I think we may have touched on this in the first or second class with “Frankenstien”, but I feel as if both of these stories shaped the modern monster/alien genre in both literature and cinema.  I assumed Carpenter’s story was predated by Stephen King and Don Siegel, but was sort of shocked at the date of publication: 1931.

Two groundbreaking stories for their time, with their own similarities.  The Antarctic setting, as I’m sure everyone noticed, as well as the descriptions of the respective “monsters.” On page four of “Who Goes There,” the thing is described as follows “the evil, unspeakable face of that monster leering up as he’d first seen it through clear, blue ice, with a bronze ice-ax buried in its skull.”  This brought up some striking imagery of the Frankenstien creature’s awakening, and I found some obvious parallels between the two monsters and the way they’re written. Both monsters are “awakened,” but in distinctly different ways.  These two stories, and how old they both are, sort of make me wonder if there is some sort of template for successful science fiction stories.

 

p.s. “The Thing from Another World” is totally worth a watch if you guys haven’t seen it before. If you aren’t too busy playing portal.

Unreliable Narration

At the conclusion of the novel I realized that Victor Frankenstien could very possibly be a closeted homosexual.  His lackluster reaction to Elizabeth’s death was what really set me off on this sort of nutty idea, but its sort of present throughout the entirety of the novel.

Victor lacks romantic love for Elizabeth and instead, feels very possessively towards her.  This is just sibling love to the extreme, and probably stemming from his parents’ involvement in their relationship from a young age; constantly pushing for them to be together.

Victor cares SIGNIFICANTLY more about Clerval’s death than Elizabeth’s, as is evident by the (almost) full chapter he writes about mourning for Clerval, and MAYBE a paragraph about Elizabeth.  I know he follows up on that with being “emotionally exhausted” due to the recent bout of trama in his life or something, but Victor is such an unreliable narrator at this point I really don’t believe him.

I suppose for the time period, there was much less of a social stigma associated with being “gay” or “straight,” so classification isn’t the issue here, just some more instances about Victor being untruthful in his narration.

I guess the most difficult thing for me with this novel was discerning WHAT exactly makes a narrator unreliable when they’ve been created by the author to portray only specific facts? What do you guys think?

More Parallels

Sort of inspired by Ashley’s post before reading the entirety of volume 1, I found a lot of parallels between Robert Walton and Victor Frankenstein.  Walton, an explorer and adventurer, is faced with the dilemma of continuing his travels and risking his own life, as well as his crew’s, or realizing his dream and continuing his journey to the North Pole.  I found this to be similar to Victor’s dilemma, one of satisfying his desire to dabble in the mysteries of the natural world, which he seems to know will cause trouble within his seemingly picturesque family, or avoid the subject completely and save himself and his loved ones from harm.

At this point in the novel, Walton isn’t as nearly dejected as the fatalistic Victor, who is retelling his tale to Walton.   This was further confirmed by Walton’s liking towards Margaret.  He even goes as far as to state “I have found a man who, before his spirit had been broken by misery, I should have been happy to possess as a brother of the heart (pg 28)” I found the characters to be extremely similar, and assume that they will continue to be, despite the fact that they are at extremely different stages in their lives, with Walton at the peak and Victor at the very bottom.

i use preexisting themes because i’m unoriginal.