The Future

        The Future and speculation

       I do my best to hold back the thought of speculating my own future, or at least trying to look too far into it; becuase there are so many variables that I can not see or even come to mind. The mind tends to go to dark places very easily as well, so that is another reason why I do not do this. However, that can not stop me for prepping for short term goals, which lead to thoughts of a future 10, 30, 50 years down especially when asked to write down those thoughts. I imagine that throughout all these times in the future, I will still be drawing and painting with traditional media, while experimenting with any new ways to make art, as long as my heart holds out, I have no idea how extreme painting will be 50 years from now but I can just imagine something with lasers and mind control. Speaking on how my career may be, I would feel blessed just to be able to make a living doing art and design, I do not have any specific places where I would like to work, but I do want to live in Washington State. The state of technology is such a crazy mystery, the thought of its advancements in the future already make me feel old, such as implanting cybernetics in our bodies to send, recieve and process data, something that I would be scared to do to myself, and already in my mind I know that generation will heckle me because of that. I do not think that this advancement is bad, but rather I believe that there are people who will find a way to use technology for bad things. I think my 80 year old self would tell me now, to keep on having an open mind, never think in extremes, and to continue to hope for the best and prep for the worst. This is something that I have done since being an Asian going to schools in LA that are predominantly Mexican, and has been rewarding my whole life, an open mind helps bring in more empathic frame of mind, and I want to try to continue this as tachnology advances.

C L Moore

Vintage Season with C.L. Moore

I read Vintage Season and Song in Minor Key, these stories threw me a bit, considering how expansive Star Wars and How dense Dune is. I understand that they are short stories, but what threw me most is how they had me picturing a time in the past rather than the very distant future. It is more obvious in Vintage Season, but more nuanced  in Song in Minor Key, the way Smith is remembering his life on earth had me imagining a simple house on the prairie in the U.S. Midwest. It was only with the description of his gun and his life on Venus that brought me back to a more futuristic mindset. Both of these stories seem very romanticized, from the visuals, to what it is these characters want in life. There is no epic quest as I imagined there would be, although the way that Vintage Season ended certainly changed in its scale, from a story of a man, Oliver, finding love with a time traveler, to the destruction of his town by a meteor, Oliver contracting a plague virus from that meteor explosion leading to his death and finally his home being dynamited in an attempt to contain that plague. I thought this climax reached an epic scale of fallout from the events that transpired in the story; considering how innocently it seemed to start, even though I had a rousing suspicion of these time travelers from the very beginning, the story did a good job to quell that with the budding relationship between Oliver and Kleph. I thought it was pretty amusing too, I think Kleph toyed with Oliver until the very end, since she knew exactly what was going to happen in that timeline, maybe she had genuine feelings for him, but she had to have known he had to die, otherwise she would have taken him with her or stayed to help him in that time. I really enjoyed how this story built to its conclusion, I was caught completely by surprise and the fact that protagonist died in a failed attempt to warn people of this plague and visitors of the future made it all the more satisfying. No present wrapped in a pretty bow here, just some cold hard futility.

Boneshaker Cherie Priest

Boneshaker Cherie Priest

This book read like an exciting movie, it introduced several interesting ideas and some great world building that really immersed me. I had different expectations about the book, I thought it would have more obscure terms to throw me off, but it was really accessible. Briar is a great protagonist, although she kept Leviticus’s fate a secret was kind of strange; maybe if she just came out and told him Zeke would not have just run through the rotter infested city. I think at least then she would have had more control over the situation, but then again the story might have been a stroll through the park rather than the rip roaring adventure that it is. I loved the idea of how these people found a way to make a drug out of the poisonous gas that can zombify them. Though the scenery and backgrounds are very nicely imagined it is Briar’s stand out determination and grit that really holds it all together. Zeke is a pretty angst ridden teenager, which is not especially annoying but does deserve an eyeroll. I dismissed how there was not any deeper scientific explanation about the blight, how the rotters become that way, or how the many machines work, because the overall story and characterizations were enough to hold my interest. This would honestly be a really good movie, or a series that expands and really gets into detail about the world around them. The visuals I think would be top notch, Cherie Priest does a good job with describing the environment just enough to get us to create good visualizations in my mind I think.

Bloodchild

Bloodchild

I have read a short story by Octavia Butler before, so I have some familiarity to the topics and writing style. Her work is wonderful, I like trying to sift through the deeper meanings within the seemingly outrageous events happening. Such as how there’s this story about a kid interacting with his alien overlord, who is trying to convince him to allow her to lay eggs in his body. Generally, whenever I read a story, I try to implant myself into it; that way I can contemplate about the lessons that are written in subtext. I think Ocatavia Butler is very good at using these sorts of mechanisms to craft really intriguing and winding tales. All of the overt science fiction themes are over course interesting and at times the concepts can seem grotesque; such as the brutal outcome of a male host being torn apart by the worms inside his body. What I took from this tale wasn’t any of the bizarre events taking place, but the relationships developed between all the characters. The human’s relationship with these aliens is one way symbiotic, but I think the more sinister theme is a sense of being held hostage/indentured spawning pool; and deeper than that is the personal relationships of the families and the aliens. Twisted love, manipulation, and hidden agendas are all over this story, twisted love comes about more so to me than anything. T’gatoi seems to be very elegant in her manipulation of Gan, and Gan has developed a distorted and forced sense of love because of that. Despite seeing the horrific birthing operation, which was seemingly covered up as a freak accident, it seems like Gan still has feelings for T’gatoi in the end, but T’gatoi uses Gan’s feelings for his family’s welfare on him to complete the impregnation. It’s like a cautionary tale about co-dependence when breaking it down to a more human level, these 2 characters are making moves that almost ensure a future of mutual destruction, on the one hand Gan potentially could be ripped apart, and on the other is a gun the family gets to keep that could be turned on T’gatoi should the outcome of the birth be disastrous; and the deal is sealed with his impregnation. All of Octavia’s stories should be made into an anthology type show on a streaming service, considering shows like Black Mirror, X-files and Twilight Zone. It would be very rewarding to see her legacy secured, considering that making a series in this way means that it has a higher chance to stick to the source material, which is already stellar.