The central event for the novel Oryx in Crake is the advent of a mega-virus, named JUVE, which nearly completely obliterates the human population. All that remains after it sweeps the world are Snowman, aka Jimmy, and a bunch of "Crakes"...genetically engineered humans designed to live easily and peacefully. Oh, and apparently some other humans...but we don't find that out till the end (and book doesn't say much about them).

Upon reading William Gibson's novel "Pattern Recognition", I noticed that the main character Cayce's life is sort-of divided into two different "realms". The first is reality, or better put her life outside in the city meeting people, working, discussing trends, etc. The second, and the one that caught my interest, is her life and interaction on the forum, Fetish:Footage:Forum, which almost ends up being another world for Cayce and the other major posters.

Two long essays, a couple other assignments....I really don't have time for this tonight, so I'll take my second pass now in hopes that I shouldn't have a problem doing them the rest of the semester.

Snow Crash takes a very interesting approach to the future...namely, an evolution of what we'd consider the internet. However, this web of information is more than just a bunch of pages to look at...its a whole new reality whatsoever, with people interacting, sharing, and doing stuff almost as if it is the real world....with some modifications.

As was already shown in class by the presentation, the events of the book Slow River, while mixed up and shown out of order, can be lined up to form the majority of Lore's life. Beginning in Chapter 2 when Lore is at the age of 5, and ending with her rejoining her Father again at the end of the novel.

However, on first glance it seemed like these events were just thrown together in random order....in a sort of flashback-y way. A little rough, but not terribly unusual.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I haven't seen any topics about Gattaca so far...and its a bit hard to find individual comments about it when there is no tag for it.

I've watched it three times now....twice in the past, and once this week....and I personally find the movie quite engaging to say the least.

Is there a particular reason I'm not seeing much discussion for it?

This week has been busy, what with several of my classes wrapping up things before break....so I'm going to pass on this weeks response.

So I'm about two-thirds of the way through "Adulthood Rites" now, and while "Dawn" seemed to focus a bit more on the alien aspect (the Oankali) this second part seems to shift towards the humans, both resister and "trader".

Le Guin's novel seems to be an interesting, if strange, subject -- bisexual individuals -- yet it seems that a majority of the sort of "oddness" that appears is either random differences from humans -- for example, not being able to say the "L" sound (Le Guin 30) -- or in the developing relationship between Genly and Estraven in the later parts of the novel. Other than that....most of the events and societal customs observed seem either familiar or not very outlandish.

Obviously the central issue of The Handmaid's Tale has to do with the role of women in society, especially in the future, considering how much of a stark contrast there is between the world of today and the world of tomorrow portrayed in Atwood's novel. However, to actually quantify and sort out the differences between these two situations takes a bit more thought and depth.