I found the conception of the Apocalypse in Samuel Delaney's Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand the most interesting part of the book. Delaney’s idea of how worlds end is so different from other books and from popular thought. For one thing, it is not really an Apocalypse, an end of days – life, and culture, goes on even after a world has been destroyed by that enigmatic thing, the Cultural Fugue. Secondly, the world does not end by asteroid collision, or by a trigger-happy country with too many nuclear warheads but by information, and by culture.

This book made me think entirely too hard about things I am not comfortable thinking about - what is human, what is free will, do humans really suck this much, etc etc etc. Now that I’ve finished, I’m still stuck thinking about it, but I am having a difficult time grounding what I have to say in the text, or even articulating it in something approaching a coherent fashion. I’ll give it a shot, though.

So, I watched a bit of this movie the other day, a 1973 French cartoon called La Planete Sauvage. I only saw part of it because I got super creeped out by it, but the part that I did see was very reminiscent of Lilith's Brood to me. Humans are toyed with, what it is to be human is questioned, superior and uncaring aliens screw around with human lives, the whole bit.

I think you can find most of it dubbed over into English on youtube. Watch it if you want to feel like you are on hard drugs.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070544/maindetails

I'm punking out on this response, along with everyone else, apparently. Though (as I have said repeatedly) I was really into the movie for this week, Le Guin didn't really do anything for me.

As I said before, I think Barbarella rocks. Also, I found it to be suprisingly feminist, considering - well, considering everything. On the surface it's pretty wonderful in its unselfconscious exploitation of Fonda's sexuality, but its underlying concepts are much more subversive.

omg, barbarella has just become my favorite movie ever. I say that with no irony whatsoever. the pill sex scene ~1:05:00?? AMAZING! I want my hair to curl and my hand to smoke like that.

AND I want to be able to smoke essence of man..

So, last summer I managed to read/watch both versions of Children of Men. My faulty memory has since swept most of the details away, but armed with some wikipedia articles as refreshers, I think I can get most of the important details back again. As an opener: this is one of those rare pairs of book & adaptation that are both totally incredible without being carbon copies of one another. And, any director/cinematographer/actor that can handle a single 5 minute shot of people dying, shooting, and blowing things up is totally out of Hollywood's league.

Given that this was the first week the book and the movie could be so directly contrasted, the differences between literary and Hollywood conceptions of what makes a good story really struck me. My generalized conclusion: Hollywood is SO LAME!

What is the biblical meaning of the colors red and blue? I feel like they play some sort of role in The Last Supper fresco, but I can't remember what it is.

So, as I was toodling along and reading Handmaid's tale, I realized that I didn't know the protagonist's name, so I wiki-ed it. I found it out, but hadn't yet gotten to the part with the explanation of WHY she was called Offred, so I just figured Atwood had made it up. What I noticed about it was how similar it was to the word 'offered.'