Author Archives: entirelypointless

Let’s compare The House of the Scorpion to other works we’ve read.  I’ll try to rank them in some sort of odd sense of perceived similarity and, maybe, even message. There are some obvious comparisons between Scorpion and Frankenstein.  I think those particular comparisons resonate most strongly.  Let’s really look at the nature of the Continue reading →

“Heaven was not intended for the casual visitor; any paradise in which the flesh-constrained would feel at home would have been intolerably pedestrian to the disembodied souls who lived there.” I fell in love with this quote near the beginning of the second section of Blindsight.  I almost automatically love any quote having any sort Continue reading →

Some sort of journal: I don’t like it. It’s not right. They’re the ones who did this to us. The ones who take away our last vestiges of freedom. Why should we ever try to bargain with them? Those monsters won’t ever change us back. They won’t fix us. They’ve taken something from us that Continue reading →

I don’t really get the ooloi.  I understand that they facilitate the reproductive process, but I really wonder about their nature as a “gender”.  They aren’t, entirely, a gender.  They’re a bridge so that men and women can successfully reproduce.  I wonder then, why are they considered a gender in that society?  What is the Continue reading →

As I was reading We3 and looking at the character archetypes of the three main characters, I began to wonder what I was really looking at. Grant Morrison is pretty big into psychology.  I had a friend tell me about his use of Jungian psychology or something along those lines in his comics.  I have Continue reading →

I don’t find myself having much difficulty with Neuromancer.  Cyberpunk is a familiar landscape after so many years of playing the (now ancient) game Deus Ex.  That game traverses a lot of the same ground that Neuromancer covers: a world rotting underneath megacorporations with a population augmented by implants.  So, I suppose I didn’t have Continue reading →

There is one major sticking point that bothered me about Campbell’s “Who Goes There” (and the terrifying childhood memories of watching The Thing).  Everyone immediately decries the Thing as an immoral monster.  And, although, there is an attempt to weakly refute the inherent evil of the creature,  it isn’t a strong one. Is it evil? I wonder about Continue reading →

A lot of what Frankenstein and science fiction concerns itself with the question of humanity.  What is human?  What will human mean in the future?  What is humanity becoming?  Can the inhuman become human?  And so on, and so on.  I picked the youtube video as a sidebar to this little talk. Within two minutes, Continue reading →

As I read Frankenstein, I think about the idea of cognitive estrangement and what it means to science fiction.  It’s the idea that something might make sense on a cognitive level but is still distended from reality.  That makes sense. Yet, how different is Frankenstein from reality?  Obviously undead abominations aren’t running around.  However, in Continue reading →