Ian Burke Senior Seminar Blog

 The seventeenth chapter opens on the first section containing Damaya's perspective in six chapters, detailing the end of her first year at the Fulcrum. After exposing the cruelty of her bullies, and of her other fellow students, she has been characterized as a loner and been further isolated from other students. Her control is increasing, however, and she is told that she will be able to take her first ring test soon. After spending some time in the abandoned structures, she meets a girl she hasn't seen before. The girl says she is from the leadership class and wants to find a secret at Fulcrum's center, where they both find an empty depression in the floor with spikes sticking out of it. They are caught and questioned separately, but the leadership girl gets off due to her position. The guardian questioning Damaya is seemingly "malfunctioning", and before it can kill her Schaff comes in and brutally kills the guardian in front of Damaya. Schaff chides her for be...

    The intrigue which the prologue sets up followed by the steady flow of information and character decisions have most definitely given me an entirely new sci-fi series to read and get to know. From the very beginning, the manner in which Jemisin crafts the story beckons you forth along the path she lays out for you. From explaining the tectonically active continent known as the Stillness to the reader witnessing a cataclysm that will come to shape the fates of nearly all the main characters and what seems to be an entirely alien yet human looking creature emerge as a result; the prologue immediately introduces the world and the bigger mysteries it has to offer. For next six chapters we follow three different women, all of whom are members of a powerful race called Orogenes, humans who can control temperature and tectonic energy. The inhabitants of the Stillness despise them because of their potentiality for mass destruction and natural disaster; so any orogenes, otherwise n...

 Very rarely have I read pieces which evokes such simultaneous discomfort and intrigue as with Butler's short work Bloodchild. The thematic lengths to which Butler stretches the thought experiment of a symbiotic relationship between two species is staggering and impressive. A young boy has been chosen by a member of a race of insects called Tlic, to bear her eggs until they are removed by caesarean section. The young boy witnesses this procedure first hand, a neighbor who's Tlic abandoned him is left writhing in agony as the plump red maggots are plucked from his veins by Gan's Tlic, Gatoi, and Gan is ordered to slaughter an animal to provide a new source of food for the freshly plucked eggs. Witnessing this event leaves the boy, Gan, understandably scarred and for the first time is confronted with the reality of what comes from this interspecies partnership. Eventually Gan chooses to end his own life with the rifle used to slaughter the animal at the beginning, but not bef...