Our last session consisted of four short stories, three as student presentations and a last one we all had to read. Once again, as it has been mentioned in previous posts, all of these stories, regardless of whether they are SF, Fiction, or Fantasy deal with created alternative realities that one way or another reflect the current actual reality we are living in. The reader may relate to the contemporary issues discussed in these stories, such as seizing the moment, respecting identity, acknowledgement of one's actions and their implications, meeting deadlines, the sacrifices on behalf of keeping up with our social engagements, among others.

Prof. María Teresa Fernández began with The Last Sunset, by Geoffrey A. Landis. In this SF short story some scientists get about and hour and a half's warning of the end of the world. One of them decides to invite a woman whom he likes, and who works nearby, on a date. They spend their last minutes holding hands, as they watch the beautiful luminosity that in a few seconds would destroy the planet. The story seems to invite us to take advantage of our finite time and to take action before it may be too late.

Prof. Lusvic followed with a story (Name needed) about a situation in which a man helps out an Amerindian family by giving them some food when they were in need. Their baby had no name at the time, and the stranger insisted a name should be given to the creature. He was named after this man as a gesture of gratitude and following their beliefs. The man finds out about this and asks them to change the baby's name, for that was his and should not be anyone else's. The family changes the name, to suit the purpose of both respecting their beliefs and the man's request, as well.

Prof. Cipdeg Guevara conducted Hanif Kureishi's The Tale of the Turd's presentation.
It is the story of an addict who, while in a dinner party at his in-laws', is unable to get rid of a stool in the bathroom. The dread in his life is compared to the stool and the fact that he cannot put either of them behind. In the end, he fetches the stool and throws it out the window, as he has he seems to have done with his own life.

Finally, For the Life of Sheila Morgan, by Dennis Lester McKiernan, was discussed as a group. It is the story of a freelance writer who buys a computer in order to meet a deadline for her piece. A magical software which could grant any spell in exchange for part of the remaining time of the user's life came in the CD-ROM unit of the machine. She misses her deadline and incidentally takes it out on the rude fat man who sold her the machine. Her financial situation gets tight, and the story leaves an open ending from which one may assume she would wish for money or something else to avoid being evicted, for it is implied by the footsteps she hears approaching her apartment, as her car is being towed away.

SELF DESTRUCTION!

Blue, blue, blue pictures of you... That is the name of the story presented by prof. Vielma. In the story, contemporary issues were developed by the author when he presents the middle-age crisis. He portrays through two different characters, different lifestyle which are linked by something in common: drugs. After a series of conflicts, both men ended up envying each other's lifestyles and pitying because of their own one. That as a typical human behavior, human beings sometimes do not treasure what they have and want to have what others do.

We also read a story written by the SF writer Frederick Pohl, this story is called Fermi and Frost. It questions the use or better the misuse of technology against humanity. The setting is the world, specifically USA and Iceland during and after World War III. The narrator presents two possible endings giving the chance to the reader to select the ending he wants for the story.
In both texts, the destruction of the human being as a consequences of his own decisions is stated.

Reality Thought Out of the Box

Last week's session of our seminar began with a look in the life like happenings of the fictional short story Blue, Blue Pictures of You, by Hanif Kureishi, from his collection Love in a Blue Time. This story was discussed in one of the students' presentations I had to conduct. The rebellious,
irresponsible youth of England and issues of the middle aged share the topic focus of this collection. It is not surprising then to come across sex, drugs, music (rock 'n' roll) and the situations these create with an interesting touch of black humor. But more seriously, identity in postcolonial world and the struggles in small community of imigrants give the literary work an autobiographical feature, since Kureishi is the son of a Pakistani father and a British mother.

The plot is common place, but the characters and implications for the social stereotypes of London at the time give it an interesting twist, portraying reality in a very simple, yet appealing, way. A middle aged married (apparently not happily) photographer meets a drug dealer in his thirties who is dating a beautiful woman, around the same age. They ask the photographer to take some pictures of them naked, making love, fornicating... When it is done, the woman asks the artist to burn them. She wants him to be her guide in life for whatever is coming next. He needs the freshness of her naivety. An open ending makes us wonder whether they became lovers, or if maybe he just mentored her, or maybe even both of the above.

For last week's post we were to discuss Frederik Pohl's Science Fiction story Fermi and Frost, as well. It is a futuristic prophetic-like account of what could happen if, hypothetically, someone pressed the button for a nuclear bomb to go off. A reference to Fermi, an Italian scientist is given. His theory of the possible reasons other intelligent life forms from a distant planet might have not contacted us, assuming they could exist, include respect for our privacy, fear of our violence, or the fact that they themselves might have made the same mistakes humans did with the mishandling of technology and power, making them extinct as well. Reflection on the part of the reader is induced through the use of strategies such as self-reflexivity. The implications of these kind of texts include an unconventional presentation of narrative and a greater commitment on the part of the reader. In this case the author offers two ending possibilities that lead to the same course of events, although each with a different attitude towards them. It is up to the reader to take a stand and contribute to make either one of them happen in real life.

Finally, a song was to be selected, any song as long as it dealt with fantasy, magic and the like. Due to a silly grammar mistake on my part due mainly to distraction, a line in the aforementioned story, "we singed the carpet", was misinterpreted as sang the carpet (fortunatelly the misunderstanding was noticed before the presentation). This led to research on any song that had anything similar in the tittle or the lyrics, and that would belong to psychodelic rock, for this is what the characters in the story listened to. I came across Magic Carpet Ride (http://www.steppenwolf.com/lyr/magcca.html) recorded by Steppenwolf . The song is about a well around man who invites a girl to join him in an adventure of discovery, on a magic carpet. The magic carpet is an allusion to Persian carpets that were loaded with a hallucinogenic substance, and that made those "on it" trip away into fantastic adventures.

One of the verses of the song reads, "Fantasy will set you free", and in fact, all of these literary works we have discussed deal with created alternative realities. The use of Fantasy, Science Fiction, or Fiction for that matter, allows authors to devise creative ways to convey their self-reflexive messages. "Setting us free" from the stressful and sometimes cornering reality we are living in is contemporary authors' contribution to "thinking out of the box" for a better living.