Uzumaki is honestly one of the greatest mangas I've read yet. It's so compelling to see a town become swallowed by a shape- that being the spiral. It's also interesting to see how Junji Ito incorporates this unusual shape into the lives of the people of Kurouzu-cho, and how it drives them insane. That being said, I think my favorite story of the bunch is The Spiral Obsession, Part 2 . The human body is a fascinating thing. It feels weird to see diagrams of the stuff inside us and know that all these parts help us function. That being said, in Uzumaki , Shuichi's mother takes this uneasiness with the human body to the next level, in the form of her fear of spirals. The imagery that Ito includes in this chapter is horrifying. Watching the woman cut off her own fingertips physically made my OWN fingertips tingle, as if something was touching them. What got me even worse, though, was watching her jab the scissors into her ear, because of the spiral th...
...but words can manipulate you and turn you into a traitor against your own starship crew. In all seriousness though, Babel-17 was a very strange read for me. Reading this novel right after The Martian was a huge change of pace. While in The Martian I felt that I had a clear picture of Mark Watney's surrounding environment and predicament, I felt like I was walking through a haze while reading Babel-17 . All the stuff about body modifications, and futuristic starships, and the whole concept of a "triple" not registering to me as a form of three-way relationship until I looked it up, it was very confusing. And yet throughout all the haze of world-building exposition, the one thing that stood out to me the most was the concept of using language and words as a weapon. At first I was surprised at Samuel R. Delany's choice to use a language as the main conflict of the novel. Normally when you think of space adventures, you would picture the main sourc...
With the current state of the world right now, I feel that this is a better time than ever to show appreciation for the African American authors of the past and the present. As I looked through the reading list, I came across W.E.B. DuBois' name, along with his work The Comet . Though I had heard of DuBois from my high school history classes, I did not know any of his works. When I saw that The Comet was written in 1920, I wasn't expecting much out of the "sci-fi department". Normally when I think of what defined sci-fi back then, my mind tends to lean towards the film Metropolis . Robots, utopias, weird machines, anything futuristic. How could a single comet compare to that without feeling inferior? It all made sense after I finished reading. The sci-fi element was just the backdrop to the main theme of the story; the comet was the catalyst for the realization that racial discrimination is not only an absurd concept, but it unfortunately takes a serious tragedy for ...
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