The short story “The last question” by Issac Asimov provides me an option of what is the most meaningful question we should ask in our life? For we always question every day rather than life.The story is horrifying to me, for it creates a loop to a question that can never be answered, and also [...]
Taking Care of the God is short science fiction story written by a Chinese SF writer Cixin Liu, which I considered as one of the best works integrated science fiction factors with traditional Chinese cultural dimension and moral criticism. Not similar to the typical alien invasion story, it introduces an alien race who claiming themselves [...]
Naomi Alderman’s novel The Power flips the gender hierarchy in order to examine the nature of power itself. First released in the United States in October of 2017, the same month the #MeToo movement began, this British novel is inextricably rooted in contemporary conversations surrounding gender dynamics, societal inequity, and sexual assault. In addressing her [...]
Ted Chiang’s novella “Story of Your Life,” an elegant experiment combining aliens, variational principles, and the linguistic relativity hypothesis, was first published in 1998, just as the western world was coming online and people were beginning to come in contact with each other in unprecedented ways. It was before the rise of now-ubiquitous and near-instantaneous [...]
Nicholas Silcox Professor Kimon Keramidas Science Fiction: Humanity, Technology, the Present, the Future 02/25/2020 Essay 2: SF in Context Samuel R. Delany is considered a giant among speculative fiction writers for his prolific career and literary style. Delany commonly used speculative fiction as a way to explore philosophy and theory, and wrote literary criticism that [...]
Austin Anderson Dr. Kimon Keramidas Science Fiction The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil George Saunders’s The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil is a geopolitical border war leading to genocide disguised as pithy novel about two races of assemblage-human-like-figures. As Saunders puts it, “[Phil is] a kid's story about genocide” (1). Saunders begins Phil with, “It’s one thing to [...]
Whenever we talk about “Frankenstein”, we will think of the author's description of the monster: a tall body, yellow eyes, composed face by corpse blocks, and the stink smells. Everyone was panic when they first saw the monster, tried their best to expel him. Even its creator, Frankenstein, was scared to escape because of the [...]
In Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Last Night of the World,” which was originally published in Esquire magazine and later became a part of The Illustrated Man, the main character asks his wife a universally familiar question: “What would you do if you knew this was the last night of the world?” As the story was first published [...]
What is Sci-fi? Science fiction for me now is more like a prediction or prophecy. For science as an adjective provides the fiction with more logic and makes it more rational for the reader to follow. And it is supposed to be depicting something that happened in the future or parallel universe which means it [...]
Personally, I think, science fiction is a bridge between realism and imagined future. As Le Guin states, I do agree that science fiction is descriptive because its story background and topic actually comes from the present, and we can easily find the existing analog for the fiction creation in reality. Also, even for an inexistent creation, it still needs [...]
