Sci-Fi

Sitting down and writing a blog on a beautiful Friday afternoon might be one of the hardest things to do, so we will see how this goes.

I have never been drawn to the genre of Science Fiction, for some reason it has never appealed to me and so when I started this class and was looking at the different books that we were going to be reading I was a bit concerned that I would be totally lost and confused the entire quarter. Once we started reading the books in class I didn’t have problems with most of them so I am somewhat unsure why they scared me at first.  I guess we are all scared at first of the things that are unknown to us. In high school I was scared to be coming to college and once I graduate college I am sure that I will be scared to join the ‘real world.’

Reading the book ‘Postsingular,’ I am finding that the character I am watching is the little autistic boy named Chu. With my previous experiences dealing with autistic children I know that many of them have special gifts when it comes to math and science, many have the ability to memorize numbers and recite them in perfect order within only a matter of minutes of studying the list.  My cousin is autistic and she is very similar to Chu, she is socially behind in development and her language skills are not all the way there but she is very intelligent when it comes to math and knowing strange facts about numbers that I would not expect a 15 year old to know. With this in mind, I feel like Chu will somehow have a huge impact on the story line as the book picks up.

Today in class we discussed Science Fiction and how in some ways it can be defined as simply looking at the world from a different perspective, a different point of view. The book that I am reading for book group is ‘Midnight Robber’ and even though I am almost finished with the book, I am still very much confused at to who the speaker is throughout the story. At some points it seems as though the story is being told from Tan-Tans eyes because the speaker refers to ‘daddy’ and other times s/he refers to ‘Antonio’. It is this type of viewpoint, the one that changes that makes this book Sci-Fi a Sci-Fi.

Memories in a sense are Science Fiction too because everyone remembers an event differently. Just an hour ago I was on the phone with my brother talking about a trip he and my mom took when coming to surprise me in Maine where I was going to college at the time. He remembers walking out from behind a building and seeing me take a double take because I was not expecting to see him all the way across the country at my Cross Country Race. He tells me that I had a look on my face that made it seem like I had just pissed my pants.

I of course remember this event in a totally different way. I can clearly see my mom and brother walking out from behind a building and I my mouth just dropping open in complete shock. I was overwhelmed with joy to see them. And of course there is my coach who was the mastermind behind this entire plan. He remembers it in a different manner all together. He knew where my family was standing and he could see me walking towards them. He got to see the look on my face and my frantic embrace as I tried to understand why my family had flown across the country to see me. My coach’s point of view would be the one of science fiction. He tells the story from the eyes of an outsider to the events.