The Belonging Kind by John Shirley and William Gibson

The reality in The Belonging Kind seems similar to our own, it even includes bar hoppers who just also happen to be chameleons on crack.

I really enjoyed reading this short story. I was ridiculously curious as to what was going to happen next the entire time, and even now I'm still curious. These strange creatures that the narrator encounters are really fascinating. Their transformations sound haunting to the narrator but go unnoticed to everybody else around them. There are so many questions unanswered and yet the narrator just accepts their way of life easily. He was so starved for acceptance and just being able to fit in that all the terrifying aspects of these creatures was easily overlooked.
I am particularly curious as to how these humanoids are able to transform the way they do. The descriptions of how the dress fell off and dissolved like foam, and they could pull money out of gills in their skin sounds too organic to be a technological body modification. Since these transformations also tie into the way they sleep and live, I wonder if they're an alien life form or a product of genetic experimenting.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Coming of Age and Education in The Night Circus

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern follows the life of Celia and Marco, bound to each other and competitors in a game before they even knew the other existed, and how their game affected the lives of everyone around them. Every character in this novel, Celia, Marco, the twins, their friend Bailey, had magic thrust upon them. I believe that magic here is supposed to represent life and the education that comes with it. It is unavoidable and how someone is educated as a child, greatly affects their adulthood. Focusing on Celia and Marco, I thought they were both abused as children through their education. Celia's father was extremely "hands-on" with his teaching. He pushed Celia to the point of breaking both physically and emotionally. All teaching was done through trial and error, resulting in scars and the death of a pigeon. While this did develop the magic she was born with into amazing skills, it didn't focus on ways to "work smarter" and left Celia an o
Read more

The Historical Notes

The Historical Notes at the end of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale add a significant amount of context to the novel. While reading Offred’s story, there is a lot of information that Offred herself and therefore the reader is never given as well as pre-Gilead events that are not explained but just implied. For example, what environmental aspects lead to the extremely low birthrates in the United States? The historical notes explain that it was “linked to the various nuclear-plant accidents, shutdowns, and incidents of sabotage that characterized the period, as well to leakages from chemical- and biological-warfare stockpiles and toxic-waste disposal sites… both legal and illegal… and to the uncontrolled use of chemical insecticides, herbicides, and other sprays.” The notes also put the entirety of Offred’s tale in a new context: cassette tapes; which is a very interesting development for the reader but also explains the development of Offred’s story telling througho
Read more