Literature of Horror, Fantasy and Sci-Fi

After reading Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake , I described it as "the COVID-19 conspiracy theory that my grandpa sent me on crack." The shocking similarity to our current state, and the outcome of the book attributing itself to the worst parts of capitalism made it all the more hard for me to digest the novel. I personally did not enjoy it for mostly that reason, but looking at it from an objective standpoint has shown me that Oryx and Crake is a very well-written commentary on many things in our current society. Going in, I had a feeling that I would be reading something on the more literary side masked by a very specific type of genre writing; I was already familiar with Atwood's style due to having read The Handmaid's Tale . When picking a novel, I usually go for something on the more genre fiction side. I enjoy escaping into tales of possible futures, odd worlds, adventures beyond my wildest dreams; it is just that, an escape from our current lives and ...

Oh, do I love a good paranormal story set in Victorian England. I was actually extremely excited for this week's reading, as steampunk is a huge inspiration for a lot of the work I do. And in turn, I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the audiobook for Soulless by Gail Carriger. Carriger's witty writing and colorful cast of characters very quickly drew me in, and I found myself laughing along as the reader delivered the story. I think that one of the most interesting points of this novel is not quite the addition of supernatural creatures themselves, but the way Carriger incorporated these creatures into the high society of a typical victorian-era steampunk setting. Although this requires the reader to have some sort of prior knowledge of the social hierarchy during this time period, Carriger quickly catches those who don't up to speed with Alexia's rebellion against it all. Her introduction to the way vampires and werewolves are incorporated as beings that live almos...

As society progresses and begins to widely accept new ideas and sexuality, it is very interesting to see what artists of the past have done to portray these ideas that seemed so alien and uncomfortable in days' past. In The Left Hand of Darkness , author Ursula K. LeGuin explores the idea of an androgynous people and the way their society revolves around this fact. Their adaptable anatomy that forms only once a month as they pair off for kemmer  was a pivotal part of the novel, and acted as a foil to the main character's rather sexist point of view sometimes. I find it very interesting that such a subject was discussed as early as 1969. Although the novel was published only months before the Stonewall riots, gender and sex was still much less publicly talked about than sexual orientation. Having so forward of an idea as androgyny (even through a very scientific lens) was not something I have seen in literature from this time period. However, I found it coming from much less o...

From the beginning of the novel, I knew that I was not going to like Gully Foyle; I mean, you're not supposed to, as he is an anti-hero. In recent media, some anti-heroes have been spun to be redeemable, and Gully Foyle is not even close to any of them until possibly the end. This may be due to his arc being similar to that of the hero's journey featured in many fantasy novels. He does skip a few steps here and there, but overall goes through stages such as death and rebirth, transformation, and atonement. Gully's overall transformation from a rather dim oaf, to a cunning aristocrat, to the people's savior was jarring to say the least, but it did act as a measure of his journey throughout the story. I first thought that the aristocrat part was the end of Gully's transformation, but he could not have fully gone through the transformation section of the hero's journey without having gone through his "death and rebirth" phase. To me, that only occurred ...