Horror/Sci-fi/fantasy Literature

1. What is your reaction to the text you just read? I am left feeling slightly uncomfortable after reading this short story, "Bloodchild." This seems to have an underlying analogy, from a metaphorical standpoint, but to what I am not too sure. Slavery? There seems to be many themes taking place, such as these insect-like Tlic using humanoid Terran to carry their young. But there seems to be an enslavement by the Tlic, making the Terran live on a "reserve" and only use them to carry their spawn. Super weird. 2. What connections did you make to this text? discuss the elements you connected with? Frankly, it was hard to connect with anything going on in this story. But if I were to go out on a limb, something that struck or resonated with me was how it was decided by the family and Tlic who the Tlic was going to implant their young in, the choice was usually taken away from the Terran carrying. This reminds me of in past older years when families decided who you ...

A fantastic example of a story illustrating the fiction of ideas is, "I have no mouth, and I must scream".  A central idea and theme for this week was mind experiments and just how far fetched ideas could be and still make sense within the fiction. While beginning, " I have no mouth, and I must scream", you are dropped into this world with no back story or real context to characters or setting and expected to keep up in this tumultuous world filled with pain, agony, and torture. You begin to put together this tale of a dystopian future, ran by a form of AI, or in this case, AM. I found it to be very curious, this story being written in the year 1967 and has so many common themes of today with artificial intelligence taking over the world as we know it.  This story was written after the red scare was pretty much over with, but it takes on the setting and back story, as we come to find out, of a world where the war against communistic countries waged on and eventually...

This week on the note of space operas and science fiction, I read through "The Star" by Arthur C Clarke. This short story was very fascinating to dive into, it took on different elements than what I was expecting due to usual sci-fi stories. "The Star" is told almost as a journal entry, told from the point of view from a man of the cloth. This struck me as an unusual element within the genre of sci-fi, however the story does proceed to hit many of the key markers in space opera. The narrator speaks of the dynamics in space and on this voyage, there is not much action that takes place but more of the explanation of events or occurrences. But after every nebula or star burst explained, the narrator seems to reside back to the theme of questioning his faith and his god. To my knowledge, this overall theme Clarke produces of the clergy man in question is a bit out of character for the sci-fi genre. Although, with this story being published in the late 50's, when the...