How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse (K. Eason) – Synopsis!

“Rory Thorne is a princess with thirteen fairy blessings, the most important of which is to see through flattery and platitudes. As the eldest daughter, she always imagined she’d inherit her father’s throne and govern the interplanetary Thorne Consortium.

Then her father is assassinated, her mother gives birth to a son, and Rory is betrothed to the prince of a distant world.

When Rory arrives in her new home, she uncovers a treacherous plot to unseat her newly betrothed and usurp his throne. An unscrupulous minister has conspired to name himself Regent to the minor (and somewhat foolish) prince. With only her wits and a small team of allies, Rory must outmaneuver the Regent and rescue the prince.

How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse is a feminist reimagining of familiar fairytale tropes and a story of resistance and self-determination—how small acts of rebellion can lead a princess to not just save herself, but change the course of history.”

BrainEx- https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/02/magazine/dead-pig-brains-reanimation.html

We happened to read this article in my Intro to Psychology class and it made me think about science fiction. Sestan’s experiment with the BrainEx machine sparked a wave of media coverage, with much of it misrepresenting his project and jumping to wild conclusions. The idea of “bringing brains back to life” is a scary one and requires a lot of thought on whether the scientific world should even proceed with an experiment like this- maybe it’s better to invest our resources into something else. But someone may continue developing this technology–someone less concerned with the ethics than Sestan. The future of this technology could be dangerous in the wrong hands, and is one that has been explored before in SF literature.

 

The Feminist Utopia

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/4316070.pdfrefreqid=excelsior%3Aac0c83bfd7f1d665c24444c30b892cc3

I’ve started to explore how the “feminist utopia” has been used throughout science fiction writing. I thought it was interesting how this author notes that much of the writing surrounding feminist utopias had in some ways strong links to the present world. The setup of present-day gender roles is usually in the back of the reader’s mind. Throughout her article, Pfaelzer thinks about whether “To what degree does the separateness of the feminist utopia reinscribe women’s “otherness” in its attempt to subvert and criticize it?”