Natasha from King Rat

"Bloodchild" Assessment

"Bloodchild" by Octavia Butler My first reaction to Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild is a mix of interest and disgust. Using humans as a subservient society to the Tlic rather than having humans assert power over the aliens is a fresh twist on the usual sci-fi story. I’ve never read or watched a story that had humans as powerless as they are here- there’s no way for them to fight back, really. The human race has been completely taken over, and they’re generally okay with it, which is unsettling. It was an interesting read, that's for sure. Such a unique story gets the mind wondering about a world where humans aren't the superior species and don’t come out on top after an invasion, a concept far less explored in the sci-fi genre. The disgust I felt is, of course, for the humans’ role in the Tlics’ lives. Parasites are a big fear of mine personally, so reading a story where humans exist solely to be hosts to the worm-like children of the Tlic is absolutely terrif...

"Johnny Mnemonic"

“Johnny Mnemonic,” by William Gibson, is a dystopian short story about a man named Johnny who acts as a living database, storing information for others. After a violent mix-up at a club, he and the girl who caused the death of his client run off and escape to Nighttown, where she and her partners take the information and end up battling in the ruinous town over the Floor. The storyline was a bit hard to follow, and I wasn’t always clear on what was happening or who the characters were. Parts of it felt random, and the chaotic vibe was difficult to unravel. Something that stuck with me, though, is that the scariest part of this short story wasn’t the blood or the augmented humans and dystopian ruins of society, but the empty shell that Johnny Mnemonic has made his mind. He collects information for others and spits it back out with no memory of what he said. Of course, at the end he decides to stop being a traveling flashdrive of a human being, but to live a life where your brain can...

"The Fiction of Ideas," or How Changing One Part of the Human Race Changes The World

“The Fiction of Ideas” is an interesting topic; change one thing about the human race, and an entirely new world is created. Such a wide variety of stories can come from this subgenre, each taking wildly different paths. Two short stories I read that fall under this broad category are “The Drowned Giant” by J. G. Ballard and “Come To Venus Melancholy” by Thomas M. Disch (I read a third story, “And I Awoke And Found Me Here On The Cold Hill,” that falls under this genre which is discussed in the previous blog post). “The Drowned Giant” is quite short, but in its few pages it tells a unique story. In this tale, we see what happens when a group of miniature humans find a drowned man washed upon the shore. The townspeople proceed to not only examine the giant body but crawl over it, kids using the nose as a rock to climb and the arms as stairs. The casualness with which the people treat the body is almost disconcerting, as if it’s just a large collection of rocks. Then, the scientists ...

Abby's Blog for Literature of Horror, Fantasy, and Sci-Fi

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