Lit. Horror Science Fiction, and Fantasy

The Martian takes place in the year 2035 and features a lone astronaut stranded on Mars and he must use what little he has left to survive until his rescue. This book plays on many science fiction and lone surviver tropes such as he's a trained engineer and botanist so he can build and grow what he needs to survive if stranded, yet he's injured so it makes survival that much harder. This is of course until NASA discovers he is left stranded and puts together a rescue team to go save him. This book is filled with many more of these tropes. In the end he survives and makes it home on the ship Hermes and then recalls his tale to the team who rescued him.

For this selection I have read American Gods. This plays on many mythological pantheons of gods brought together by Neil Gaiman all trying to protect Shadow from the New Gods. It changes the myths it presents by giving the gods alter-egos such as Odin the All Father being Mr. Wednesday and the Egyptians gods running a funeral parlor in Illinois. This brings a more modern take on these myths because it shows in a way that the gods of the Old World are for lack of a better term, retired and that the New Gods are the beings who are most active in the modern age. And even still the old gods fit into the context of the story very well for example Mr. Wednesday acts fatherly to Shadow because he is the All Father and the Egyptian gods run a funeral parlor because the ancients believed in an afterlife and practiced mummification for the afterlife.

Hayden Morin  My first reaction to this story is that it takes human colonization on different planets and puts a new twist on it, saying that the only reason we are allowed to live there is because we make for excellent egg bearers. And it puts a normally female role (bearing children) and puts it from a male perspective. I personally couldn't really connect with this story aside from the main character being a male. i have never been in a situation or scenario like the one displayed in the story. One connection I made with this story is that it seems similar to the struggle of many African-American slave woman who we forced to accept the "eggs" from there slavers, in this instance the Tlic.  If I were to make this story a film I would probably use the same form of filming as 12 Years a Slave used to portray a superior and inferior dynamic between the Tlic and the Terrans, while using a District 9 style of segregation since the Terrans live on almost Native America