by Sara Crow
(Find me on Goodreads!)
Literary Frontiers is a brand new series in the blog which gives us the chance to offer our perspective on both new and established science fiction and speculative fiction books. The series will publish around twice a month, or whenever one of us can finish and post one of our most recent reading projects.
The selection for our inaugural post is Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. I'll be making my way through Year of the Flood before the holiday season. Atwood is currently working on her final book in the series, which at this point will be entitled MaddAddam, and we'll be reviewing that title when it's released as well.
The review is available, just for you, after the jump (to Warp?)! Make it so!
Ruminations and imaginings of two gurrls about feminism, Star Trek, Sci Fi, Steampunk, Universal Monsters and other appropriately geeky topics.
Showing posts with label mad science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mad science. Show all posts
Friday, September 30, 2011
Friday, March 11, 2011
An Auspicious (Monstrous) Anniversary
by Sara Crow
On this date in 1818, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley published her first edition of a novel that would rock the literary world to its core--a book about the monstrous, about being an alien in a human world, and about living a life beholden to an even more monstrous majority.
During the dark and cold summer of 1816, known throughout Europe as "The Year Without a Summer" due to the ash spewed across the globe from the cataclysmic eruption of Mount Tambora halfway across the planet in Indonesia, Shelley and friends were stuck inside at a summer home rented from friends. Shelley's dark tale was written as a part of a contest between herself, her husband, her sister, and their mutual friends, John Polidori (author of "The Vampyre," a concept he actually lifted from Byron's tale that night), and Lord Byron, in an attempt to help them all write through the chill and the rain and avoid their own boredom-induced madness.
Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus recounts the story of Doctor Victor Frankenstein, who discovers the spark of life and uses it to "give birth" to a new form of life with body parts filched from the freshly-dead. Chaos and moral ambiguity ensues.
And no, before you ask, Frankenstein is NOT the name of the monster. So stop calling the Monster Frankenstein, okay? Good. Moving on.
On this date in 1818, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley published her first edition of a novel that would rock the literary world to its core--a book about the monstrous, about being an alien in a human world, and about living a life beholden to an even more monstrous majority.
During the dark and cold summer of 1816, known throughout Europe as "The Year Without a Summer" due to the ash spewed across the globe from the cataclysmic eruption of Mount Tambora halfway across the planet in Indonesia, Shelley and friends were stuck inside at a summer home rented from friends. Shelley's dark tale was written as a part of a contest between herself, her husband, her sister, and their mutual friends, John Polidori (author of "The Vampyre," a concept he actually lifted from Byron's tale that night), and Lord Byron, in an attempt to help them all write through the chill and the rain and avoid their own boredom-induced madness.
Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus recounts the story of Doctor Victor Frankenstein, who discovers the spark of life and uses it to "give birth" to a new form of life with body parts filched from the freshly-dead. Chaos and moral ambiguity ensues.
And no, before you ask, Frankenstein is NOT the name of the monster. So stop calling the Monster Frankenstein, okay? Good. Moving on.
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