This feels very surreal to be writing up my last blog ; writing one of these every Friday has become a part of my weekly writing schedule and it feels strange to have to let it go or that its just finished. It makes me sad to see it go, along with other writing projects I have worked on this semester.
Anyhoo, the stories this week really stuck with me, particularly with the stories by Carmen Maria Machado. Normally, I’m not a huge sci-fi person, I feel like many sci-fi stories, while interesting and unique, don’t do a great job of explaining the lore of their specific universes which can lead to confusion, for myself and others. However, with the stories by Machado, which are more speculative fiction rather than direct sci-fi, I enjoyed and crawled under my skin a lot more than straight science fiction would.
Her stories reminded me of the stories of a manga artist I’m a real big fan of; Junji Ito. His stories aren’t as well written, as they’re mostly focused on visceral horror imagery, but their similar in the unexplained body horror shown in the two stories of Machado’s we read this week. It was a unique connection that I found that helped me really understand the stories and enjoy them.
As much as I did like the stories by Octavia Butler, particularly “Speech Sounds”, I couldn’t really gel with Bloodchild. I had the same issues with it that I explained earlier about my general issues with sci-fi; I felt the lore wasn’t explained and it just left me feeling confused. “Speech Sounds” though I loved, I felt it reminded me of the movie “Us” with the disease causing a demise in their speech. My favorite horror comes from silence, as I think it is more unsettling and scary rather than unexplained noises. That sort of uneasiness carried throughout the entirety of the story, which I dug into and loved. The silence causing lots of violence and tension also felt quite accurate if that situation were to occur in real life.
Womens Lit. Blog 