Horror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction

Jeff VanderMeer’s world in Borne is vast and complex, yet its theme is almost exceedingly simple: don’t be an idiot of a parent. This seems to be a deep-rooted theme in science fiction; and, if you really think, shouldn’t be a surprise. The very first science-fiction novel was about the world’s worst parent: Victor Frankenstein. That being said, VanderMeer’s ways of telling his version of this theme is much different than Mary Shelley’s. First, we’re in a post-apocalyptic setting where parenting is practically impossible. In a flying-bear-eat-human world, there is no time for child rearing. Rachel, our main character, frequently flashes back to her own parents and how life was before, during, and after the apocalypse. She laments she never got to hear their true thoughts and that they put up a front to shield her from the realities of the world affecting her. Rachel eventually finds and “raises” an amorphous creature named Borne, who is a pretty big handful. While definitely not ...

I’m not one for short stories about things that go bump in the night, but the ones I do indulge in are from Western authors simply due to accessibility - being raised in America (and briefly Europe) does that to you. Reading Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things was an experience, to say the least. An anthology of traditional Japanese ghost stories was a bit out of my wheelhouse. I found myself enjoying it much more than I thought I would, though. That’s likely due to the differences between Kwaidonand my expectation of usual Euro-American ghost stories, and even further, the inherent differences between Eastern and Western culture. The most interesting difference between ghost stories in the west and those I read in Kwaidon was the art of their conclusions. In western media, we have a penchant for going after concrete endings. The supernatural being perishes and the heroes live, or vice versa. Solid. We can put down the book now and go on with our lives without having to thi...

One of the many revisited tropes in media is immortality. The idea of seeing and personally experiencing all the world’s disasters in history captivates us, I guess. Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire establishes immortality as an integral plot point (the only reason the interview can take place). The narrative, therefore, advances some heavy opinions about the topic, as well as those who seek it. Rice’s novel leaves no doubt about it: being and becoming an immortal is gross. A freak bites your neck, you drink said freak’s blood, and your body slowly shuts down. What remains is your consciousness and blood flow, which you have to supplement in order to survive (which kind of takes away the meaning of immortality). The blood-sucking itself is graphically sensual in Interview With The Vampire, revealing their killing as the last real joy that vampires have - there’s a pun on ‘flirting with death’ somewhere in there. Oh, and you can never see the sun again, so get some spray tan. The...

If one needs a guide on how to be the most oblivious of deadbeat parents, they need only to look to the actions of Victor Frankenstein of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . There’s nothing that says “World’s Worst Dad” like running out of the house, screaming after finding your eight-foot-something child looming over your sleeping form. Shelley’s entire novel, in essence, is about parenting and the relationships between fathers and their children - with the added element of being the first work of science fiction. Before getting into the analysis of the various facts, which point this towards being a parental “how-to”, it’s important to briefly mention Shelley’s own upbringing and how it relates to said analysis. Shelly was born to William Godwin, a philosopher, and novelist, and Mary Wollstonecraft, a well-known English suffragette who penned “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, in 1797. Two weeks after Shelley’s birth, Wollstonecraft died due to postpartum infections. Shelley’s rigor...