Giant Robot Squids and More and the Matrix

I'll be augmented with so much tech, I'll look like the villain from wild wild west. Everyone will probably connected to one single network via some orifice in our body .Exercise will be a thing of the pass because who needs exercise when we have augmentable limbs and android women. Robots will be thing of daily life cause humanity will be too busy to make a sandwich. Long distance space travel will possible and the moon will be a holiday resort. Our wars will be fought by giant power suits and the thing more dangerous then a nuclear bomb will be a hacker. Everyone will be reliant on interwebs. That might be the possible future for us unless we all get blown up by a nuclear war. Or an astroid.

Giant Robot Squids and More.

15 years from now, everybody will be living in tubes and the nuclear family will be dead. Population growth will be controlled because we are running out of space to put people. Ventures of going up to space and living on the moon will be made possible and interplanetary colonization will be likely. By that time also, Asia and the West will be running under two different respective flags and industrialization, and advancing technology will be the main priorities of both sides. Integrating technology with humans will be a common thing for it is necessary for an fast efficient life style.

Giant Robot Squids.

I believe immersive media technology will start taking hold in households everywhere. Im talking halo decks, virtual reality head sets, and little ear pieces that links your head up to the interwebs. The entire international community (except for North Korea and Burma) will be linked together on one big channel of communication via the interwebs. But instead of just laptops or computers, I dare say we might go as far as chips even. The human race is advancing at a alarming rate to a new technological age. And it won't be long before us humans will start integrating machine tech into evolution's design scheme. Dare I say it Ghost in a shell might be an accurate view of what could be us in five or even more years.

Blood child

The process of birth is a very painful process, from what I have heard. But also getting your own rib cage opened with rending claws is also on par too. BloodChild by Octavio Butler is an scary book. The human race is in small numbers and sharing a planet with a snake like Alien race that uses humans as incubation pods.

The experience of reading this short story at first was a intriguing ride through an alternate world. As I kept reading, I began to realize that the humans aren't the most dominate species around. And that most of the men are used as living incubation pods. Its interesting non the less though : due to unknown cataclysmic reasons the human race has fled and cut a deal with a dying race of aliens. The plot follows a boy living on a farm with his sister and brother. His time to do the service of becoming an incubation pod draws close. The story explores his turmoil of staying human and living life or committing himself to a deadly service. He learns of the two sides that plague through two characters: his brother and his father. His brother is against becoming a incubation pod for the Aliens, due to the fact that he saw whole process of how the alien young are extracted from humans thus scarring him. His father on the other hand is somebody who has taken on the task several times, literally scarring his entire body. The boy sees his brother as a rebel and his own fears makes his brothers ways more inviting. While he see his father as a mysterious figure and can't quite grasp why his father would put himself through such an ordeal.

Soon the boy is treated to seeing the birthing process of the Alien babies up close and he is horrified. He soon pulls out of this obligations and starts to resemble his brother a bit in actions for example, thinking of using his father's hidden gun on his alien friend. But after a brief while the boy is horrified to find that the Alien is going to impregnate his sister instead. He then took it upon himself to take the burden on himself again. He is impregnated by the Alien later at night and finally comes to understand the meaning of sacrifice and service to ensure the survival of both species.

The Homunculus.

So I finally got around to reading Mary Shelly's Frankenstein. It was an interesting take on story telling with its use of written letters from a sea captain to direct flashbacks of Victor Frankenstein. I really enjoyed the first person point of view throughout the story: it provided a up close view of what was happening and provided a immersive reading experience. For example, Shelly into in depth description straight off the bat in the first few chapters in describing the discovery of Victor in the snowy landscape.

It was also fun to read of how Victor went from a budding science student to be a man obsessed with playing god. From graving robbing to visiting the slaughter houses to collect the necessary bits and pieces, reveals to readers the extremes Victor is willing to go to for his science. At first I was expecting a big rampage after the monster is brought back to life: tipping women's rib cages open (like in that time traveller movie) and snapping necks everywhere BUT I got something else. The monster escapes and becomes a complex character. Trough his experiences with other characters, he finds himself as a sentient being rather then a living science experiment. His stay with the De Lacey family is where he found himself and the horrible truth that he can never be a part of society because he is a 8 feet tall super humanoid thing. ANYWAYS it was a interesting ride to go through the monster's thought process and how his efforts to be more human fail every time due to his "father" surgical actions. It gets to a point where the monster can't take the truth of his uniqueness and decides to seek revenge on his "father". He devises a plot to rid Victor of all his closest friends rendering Victor like the monster too: alone.Everybody around Victor starts dying mysteriously. First news of the murdered child and then the De Lacey family. The revealing of how the young boy was truly murdered surprised me even. An intricate cover up scheme to frame and take out two of Victor's relatives shows how the monster has inherited his father's smarts.

In the end, Victor starts on his quest to destroy his own creation which takes him to the farthest reaches of the Artics, where he is found by the ship and where his story begins. The book overall was a good adventure for me. It delivered something new to me with the Frankenstein story. The book changed my views on the monster. Instead of a mindless killing machine, the monster was a complex character who was alone in the world and a being with emotions that was made to suffer for his father's own demented pursuit of science.

Convetions of Sci fi

Exploring the Unknown

The discovery of good things and bad things

Facing adversity in a really unfamiliar environment

Exploring alien or even supernatural worlds

Dilemma of using new found things for good or evil

Stopping Aliens from destroying earth

Earth is number one

Earth is gone so characters look for new home leading to shenanigans in space

The Golden compass!

I read this book in high-school so I had to re-familiarize myself a little bit here and there. The plot to me in general seemed to be the fundamental tolkien-esque story. Lyra is the young heroine that sets off on a epic journey to find her kidnapped friend. The interesting parts are actually the elements In the story rather then the story itself. The book has a very rich platter of characters and a magical world. Each character has a Daemon: a manifestation of a person's soul in a form of a animal. Its like your conscious is your Pokemon. And there are Armored polar bears. That is awesome.

I found it interesting that Lyra sorta disorganizing anything she comes into close vicinity with : She travels to the town where Lorek was kept captive and through a turn of events she gets the bear to turn the town inside out. After that she drives Lorek to disrupt the hierarchy of the Armored Bears by killing the king in a dual. And then she heads over to the science base and then incite an skirmish between the Gyptians and the Science base's security personal.

To me this seems like a regular story that follows the hero's quest quite closely. Lyra is the hero on a journey to save her friend from the kidnapping and along the way she comes across an assortment of characters that soon become her travel companions. And another thing I noticed is that as the story progresses it evolves from a simple rescue mission to a much more bigger problem. Lyra soon discovers that the baddies are actually plotting to conquer the known multiverses and that her own farther Lord Astrid plays a role in this. That's a massive priority gap between saving a few children and stopping the conquest of the multiverses. From that I can tell that this story is going to transform from a normal hero's journey into an epic trans-dimentional adventure.

All in all this was a good read and I hope to soon get my hands on the next two books which I never really got around to reading. Looks like I got something to do for christmas.