Wednesday, September 9, 2009
A Place so Foreign take one
The first chapter of the book Place so Foreign is actually catching my attention. The first chapter of this book is called Craphound. We later find out that the title of this chapter means trash treasure finders. Craphounds are people who go around looking for junk that they can sell for more money. It makes me wonder how much money there truly is in this whole hidden treasure business. There is this guy who lives down the road from me in my hometown and he is totally a craphound or a yard saler. But I don’t think he is a very successful one. There are just piles of junk everywhere lying around. Every once in a while he will try to have a sale of his own but I doubt he makes that much at all. We were told in class that this book is supposed to be Science Fiction but I struggle to find it really. In like one paragraph the main character in this chapter named Jerry talks about how some people think craphounds should be kicked off the planet. Jerry also says that the aliens keep us in the dark when it comes to technologies. Then Jerry goes on to say how anyone with human DNA could never survive a trip in one of those ships. This little passage of the chapter just confuses me. I guess that helps answer the question about whether it’s a science fiction book or not. I would say it has glimpses as of now from chapter one but other than that I am totally confused about that part of the chapter. Overall the first chapter of this book grabbed my attention for the time being. We will see what happens with this one.
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Even though we were supposed to read A Place So Foreign, sorry Brad :/, Craphound sounds cool. I was wondering today if all of the short stories in A Place So Foreign will be similar to the title story. I am not sure how I feel about APSF and also about the whole sci-fi category. In order for the story to be a true sci-fi tale, I think that it should have focused more on the future instead of the constant jumping to the past. Some of the futuristic jargon was difficult to understand so that did not help APSF's case. Also, when a piece of writing has so many editing errors, like APSF did, I find it difficult to get engrossed in the story. Lastly, APSF left me with questions that were never answered. For example, what happened to James' father? I think that if these few suggestions were taken into consideration then APSF would have settled a lot better with me.
ReplyDelete-maggie sullivan
I kind of liked Craphound as well. I wonder how successful those people really are. But I also find it hard to call it science fiction because it seems so realistic, besides the few parts Doctorow throw in about aliens and exoskeleton and all of that. It seems like the just put this stuff in it to make it science fiction because without it, it would just be a totally normal story about a few guys trying to turn junk into treasure and making money off of it. I mean these people collecting junk and then trying to sell it and make a lot of money is common. I have seen plenty of places like this in my Grandma’s old town that have junk all around their property, that I don’t know if they are ever able to get rid of. Like old cars that they buy at auctions and try to fix up and sell for a huge price.
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