Dana McNamara

1. This text was nothing short of confusing for me. I felt like I opened a book and started reading in the middle of it, with a lot of background information missing. It took a good while into the reading to figure out a base idea of what was happening, but I was still very confused, with different names and words being said that are given no explanation but written as though I should already know them. Some of the concepts seemed very weird and out of nowhere to me, especially the ending where the alien lays an egg in the main character. 2. I don't think I was able to make any connections with this story, it was too confusing for me to get a grasp on the characters and who they were and their relationships to one another. There is a small sense of responsibility and need between the narrator and the alien, the narrator is referred to as the aliens property, and it's somewhat reveled that the aliens need humans in order to reproduce, and that without an alien companion, the h...

I found that this story gleaned heavily and literally into the concept of generational differences in the passage of time, and the conformity of the majority. In the real world, people have been complaining about the younger generation since there was a younger generation to complain about, and older generations will always seem to cling to the world that existed when they were younger. This idea is represented in a majorly literal way, with generational change represented by literal human evolution. At the current time, a majority of the previously aquatic population has changed to be land dwelling, moving out of the water and to the land, including the protagonist as well, whos aged uncle stubbornly refuses to leave the aquatic lifestyle he has existed in for so long, clinging to what he has always knows despite what the grand majority of society is doing. The uncles whole family, as well as most of the human population ends up abandoning the uncle to go live on land, and he stubborn...

This novel was very interesting for me, and I definitely felt the spirit of the cyberpunk genre in it. The world of the future is both technically advanced and socially and economically crumbled in a way. The story gets its own title from the name of a futuristic addictive drug that can actually travel and effect its users digitally, able to spread through technology itself. The drug is able to target people through technology, essentially making people addicted to technology itself. This could definitely be interpreted as modern days supposed dependency on technology being displayed as a literal addiction. As with most cyberpunk stories, technology plays a large part in the world, as does industry and commercialism, which also seems to have a dangerous amount of influence on the citizens.

Babel-17, like it's wordplay of a title suggests, focuses heavily on the theme of language, and how it exists as such a vital and complicated facet of society, functioning both verbally and nonverbally to communicate the most complex and nuanced of signals and messages with very slight changes, even through body posture or slight tone of voice. As it is fitting of such a theme, the protagonist is a linguist and writer, and the novel begins and kicks off with her attempting to learn and decipher the language known as Babel-17, an intricate and complicated language that requires intense study to try and decode, and which seems to have some sort of real psychological or supernatural effect on the people who do come to understand it. It doesn't take long for the protagonist to decipher the language, and she soon finds herself with superhuman abilities of the mind, beginning with her being able to read the thoughts of others, and even manipulate time. As the novel progresses Its rev...

This was an exceptionally interesting read for me, which I was very happy with considering I'm not one to lean towards science fiction. The Martian was definitely unique and intriguing with its premise, following an astronaut who is mistakingly left behind on Mars, lost in a storm after his fellow crewmates escape in their ship, assuming him to be dead. The whole novel focuses on how the astronaut, Mark Whatney, will find a way to survive in the remains of his base on Mars with limited resources and no way of contacting Earth or even letting anyone know he is alive. The novel really puts its more wild concepts into the realm of possibility, making it seem like something that could potentially happen in the future, especially with current day space exploration and similar true stories, such as the Apollo 13 mission. The novel really keeps the reader engaged with a ton of interesting problems for the protagonist to solve, without losing them in complex scientific language that would ...

I was very much interested and entertained by American Gods, I've always been a fan of both Neil Gaiman's own writing style as well as the genre of contemporary urban fantasy as a whole., and this novel really seemed to sell a very simple concept in a unique fashion. The reader slowly learns more about the setting and circumstances from the story through the eyes of the protagonist, Shadow Moon. The whole idea centers around how all ancient gods, like those of ancient Egypt and Norse myth, all coexist, but have diminished in power simply because they lack worshippers and believers, so they live in the world closer to human than the deities they once were. This of course seems to reflect a deeper idea about how stories and myths only exist and have weight because of the people who tell them and keep them alive, just as the gods derive power through belief. I'm already a fan of seeing older fantastical characters and beings coexisting and living in the modern era, so I loved ...

Night Circus was a very interesting read for me, being heavily fantastical, and, although with a bit too much in the way of prose at times, I really liked the world that the novel was built around and how ingrained the concept of magic was involved in the characters lives and setting. The whimsical and otherworldly aesthetics of the whole circus itself is very original and really seems like a world in itself. There seems to be a lot of different themes in this book, I found it a little hard to follow the narrative sometimes, at points I felt like the novel was spending a bit too much time trying to explain the world and setting rather than progressing the story along. But I did like the writing of the characters and the clear themes around their own relationships with one another. I did think that this book had a similar theme to Romeo and Juliet. The two main protagonists, Marco and Celia, are being trained and placed into a magical competition to see who will continue on in the circu...