Mars Dave's Literature of Horror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction Blog

  Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was an extremely funny, extremely british part of my late middle/early high school experience. It was the first science fiction book I’d ever read that was actually funny, but it never felt condescending or rude. It celebrated the tropes and norms of science fiction. It was laughing with science fiction fans instead of at them. Later in high school I’d discovered the magic of podcasts and audio dramas. It was nice to have some way to access stories without having to be focused with my eyes, it left me time to do things like cooking, exercise, or laundry while still enjoying excellent storytelling. As a fan of both podcasts and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy , learning that there was an audio drama version of it was a wonderful revelation, and listening to it was like experiencing it for the first time all over again. When I listened to it, I set the playback speed to 2x speed. Most of the dialogue played out like a fu

  I studied a lot of dystopian novels in middle and high school, and as a young adult, dystopian novels were generally a literary trend. However, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake was the first  dystopian novel to actually make me feel scared. The alarming thing is not the actual events that take place during the course of the novel, but perhaps how closely they mirror the current state of the world. Indeed, when I read the novel, I was alarmed at the prophetic nature of Oryx and Crake. Oryx and Crake came out the same year I was born, and since then, the world has only resembled the world of the novel more. The earth, while perhaps not commercialized to the extent of branded living camps, is certainly beginning to lean in that direction. More violent and exploitative content can be accessed now than ever, and the nature of the internet is that parents are less and less able to regulate how quickly their children get exposed to those things. Seventeen years after the publication of Oryx

  1. What is your reaction to the text you just read?     I feel unnerved by this story. Being raised as breeding cattle and kept from rebellion with mind-altering eggs but a giant insect race of aliens is kind of a bleak thing to read about or imagine, no matter how unlikely it is. I also felt the sort of powerlessness and oppression that the characters in the story were feeling. In the story there was no mention of escape or revolution, just acknowledgement of the cage and the situation, and anger, but no clear way out but death. 2. What connections did you make with the story? Discuss what elements of the story with which you were able to connect.     I was able to connect with multiple aspects of the story. I connected with Lien’s desire not to participate in a society that leads to the oppression of her family and people, and to witness the atrocities being committed by her oppressors, while simultaneously being helpless to stop it. I connected to Qui’s anger and revulsion at the

  My favorite thing about William Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic is how it uses genre. It is, in essence, a noir detective story, with its quirky, campy names like Molly Millions, Ralfi Face, and of course the titular Johnny Mnemonic, it just also happens to contain the technological aspects that happen to be found in traditional cyberpunk stories. Johnny Mnemonic reminds me of my favorite cyberpunk noir detective story, the Penumbra Podcast's Juno Steele series. That is a sentence I thought I'd never write, because it seems like such a specific genre mix, it's bound to only happen once, and yet here we are. However, this mix might not be so unlikely. The thing about cyberpunk is that it has a distinctly different vibe to the clean, shiny, brand new chrominess of space operas. Cyberpunk seems to imply some element of being dirty or run-down, cyberpunk is what happens to space operas when you add a lot of colorful neon lights and then leave it to decay without cleaning it up for

  When I read Joanna Russ’s The Female Man , the feeling that I felt most was confusion. There was a lot of jumping around and new characters being introduced all the time, so I’m afraid I didn’t quite understand the plot of the book, so all that I was left with was the ideas that were raised A problem I had with this book was that Janet does initiate a sexual relationship with a teenage girl. There’s something to be said about how portraying gay relationships in fiction as unhealthy and inherently predatory is a damaging idea that’s led to a lot of harmful stereotypes. The language of The Female Man was fascinating to me. It was really interesting to see the way that women could explore the ideas of feminism before there was a real vocabulary for that sort of thing. Even the very title of the book brings up the very modern distinction between sex and gender. But it was interesting to me that the actual symbol of power, the ideal form of womankind in The Female Man, if they were to be

  Andy Weir’s The Martian has been praised for its excellent humor, commitment to hard science, and general well-told story. I don’t read too many survival narratives, because I’m faint of heart and I can only handle so many suspenseful life or death situations. The Martian ’s humor and constant refusal to take itself too seriously helped to temper all of that suspense. However, as much as I enjoyed The Martian' s wit and entertainment value, there was one thing about it that bugged me beyond belief, and that is how this book treated women. The men in this book seem It’s no secret that there is a general lack of women in the STEM field, this is due to many things, but a big reason is the way that women in STEM get treated by their male coworkers. I can only assume that Weir was aiming for realism when he portrayed the men in this novel generally just treating and talking about the women around them in a way that's just generally pretty icky. An example of this is when Teddy and