Futurismnow

     The aspect of “We Travel The Spaceways” that was the most interesting to me was how LaValle worked bits of our modern society into his version of the future. The most obvious example of this is the name Grimace. I love that no matter how much the world around will change, there is always a guarantee of McDonald’s. While it brings a smile at first, it is moments like these that make the reader realize how little the future might change if we do not do the work to make it different. The story opens with Grimace’s distaste for that name compared to the other McDonald’s mascots and uses it as the set up for Grimace’s situation as a homeless black man. “I do not like that nickname… If I make a fuss about it, the local store owners would just call the police; between them and me, it’s easy to guess who’d get handcuffed” (LaValle 3). He starts with something familiar, McDonald’s, so that the presence of something even more deeply rooted in our society, racism, has a bigger ...

  My favorite aspect of “The McCoy Game” was the importance Alston gave to music. Alston sets up the reveal of this by beginning the story with logic. For the first bit of the text, the two boys are only concerned with the logic of making their way through the house. They are deliberate in which direction they go and think out every decision using only their heads rather than their hearts. Jamal provides context to this thinking by explaining his and Dre’s family worldview. Their grandfather had a theory that there are caretakers out there that had their origins in Africa in order to “teach us stuff like math and science. Basically how to survive and thrive” (Alston 45). With this Alston sets the scene that it is science and book smarts that should get the boys through the house, making the reveal that it is music that saves them even sweeter. Once again remembering their grandfather’s outlook, the boys recount a story of his about monsters as they try to fight off a breathworm. Af...

  The aspect of the second half of Pet that stood out to me the most was how performance was used as a metaphor for Jam’s guilt about hiding Pet. One of the earlier examples in this section was when Jam was eating breakfast with her family. Her parents are concerned more than anything else, but Jam still feels the weight of their watchful eye because she is anxious about Pet’s hiding.“Pet was a loud secret in her, a wrong note in the usual harmony of her house, making it discordant, guilty” (Emezi 103). Of all the metaphors, it is fascinating that Emezi chose to focus on music, specifically its creation. By portraying that the happiness in her house is something that Jam feels she must actively perform to achieve, Emezi is showcasing the roots of Jam’s anxieties in a really interesting way. A similar situation happens when Redemption is over for dinner. While they are eating, Jam notices the metaphorical mask of casualness that Redemption has put on to avoid suspicion, and once ag...

The aspect of this graphic novel that stood out to me the most was the visualization of the future. This is probably fairly obvious as most of our work this semester has been traditional written word, but seeing the future before my eyes was very beneficial. I have not read a lot of science fiction, so visualizing the futures of these stories has always been very difficult for me. Most of the futures I have imagined and the ways that I pictured our class’s texts is one centered around silver and metal. There was always something cold and distant about the future. This totally contrasts Okorafor’s vision of the future and I love that. It brought me such joy to see a future where the world is so bright and colorful. I also love, especially given our current environmental situation, to see how central plants are. Although they are as alien as they are plants, it still provides a lot of hope for the planet. I also thought the use of aliens in the novel and their parallel to immigration in ...