Horror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction

Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman is, overall, a novel about family. A really dysfunctional, not super healthy family, but about family nonetheless. The novel follows two brothers through their adventure of meeting each other for the first time after many, many years, and the frustration behind both their clashing personalities and the death of their father. Anansi Boys also shows the importance of family, with how Fat Charlie and Spider (the respective brothers) save each other in different ways, as well as the influence of their father, the god Anansi, on their lives. This novel also explores the unpredictability of life. The boys’ lives don’t quite work out the way both they think they should - defying both their and the audience’s expectations. Anansi dying unexpectedly, which hits both boys hard (in Charlie’s case, harder than it should) is extremely unexpected to everyone in the novel, though it’s revealed he’ll come back in a few years. Rosie, Fat Charlie’s fiancée, at the be...

A lot of recent fantasy novels in the YA genre focus on coming of age. They’re filled to the brim with values and finding one’s place in the world. (I’ve mentioned this before in an earlier post, “The Witchcraft of Coming of Age”, if you’re interested.) While not exactly YA like Akata Witch , The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern definitely fits into these patterns. Though the novel generally teaches through nonexamples, rather than pointing clearly at which values it champions, it’s still a story about strong moral compasses. From a young age, our two main characters are given expectations that they never fully understand. Throughout their trials and tribulations, they’re never sure if they’re properly living up to their parents' expectations. One main character’s father constantly reminds her that she’ll never be good enough unless she keeps training. The other main character begs for feedback and never gets more than a vague answer - if he ever hears from his father figure. Ev...

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 ...

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...