Literature of Horror, Fantasy, & Sci-Fi

I chose to read Italo Calvino's short story, The Distance of the Moon', for our Literary Speculation section and it was....bizarre. Surely not the weirdest thing I've ever read but it certainly turned into something I wasn't expecting. It starts with someone older telling one of those "back in my day" sorts of stories about how the moon used to be right upon them and starts to go into the finer details of exactly how that worked. This lore is what hooked me in. It started to get a bit weird when they went into this "milk" that the moon apparently produces and how they would harvest it. That didn't throw me off completely, though, as it was still giving part into the lore of the moon and these people's relationship with it. This is also when the story started to shift more into a weird love triangle revolving around the narrator, his deaf cousin, and a married woman, and this is where it lost me. What began as a story about a people and their

For this weeks' reading I read Octavia Butler's short story, Bloodchild . It was a very interesting read, though, it made me quite uncomfortable by the end. As I progressed further and further into this story it became increasingly apparent that while Gan and his family had what they viewed to be a positive and healthy relationship with T'Gatoi, the relationship between the Terran and the Tlic was anything but. While most of the Terran in this world had come to terms with and rationalized the relationship it was clear to me that this was because of the normalized oppression of them. The Tlic claim that the Terran are as free as they are and manipulate them into believing this by making as simple a change as not referring to them as "host animals" even though they still are, even if it is to a lesser extent of abuse as in the past. They even try to guilt the Terran by claiming that they are their saviors and are being so kind as to let them live in the Preserve. Th

What stuck with me most about William Gibson's short story,  Fragments of a Hologram Rose, is the method of coping one is able to use within a world where sense-recordings exist. It is not particularly healthy to say the least. When the main character, Parker, has been broken up with by his girlfriend he immediately goes to his sense-recordings to cope with this. Sense-recordings are effectively allowing people in this world to dwell on their past even more so than they previously would or were able to and this makes it significantly harder for one to move on or grow. One could even become obsessive over this sort of thing and just live within their old memories and senses. This story actually reminded me a bit of the Black Mirror episode, "The Entire History of You" . It is of course not exactly the same in it's premise but the technology in each is similar enough and the negative affect that these sorts of things could have on people is evident in both, though perh