Tavis Reed: "Dear Michael Damian and Lynne Thomas: World Hopping"

Dear Michael Damian and Lynne Thomas: World Hopping

By

Tavis Reed

            I read to experience new worlds. I like imagining myself in different in ancient temples and far away planets. Like many readers, I want to escape mundane everyday life, and for a moment live somewhere else. I don’t necessarily want a world that is extremely detailed, but rather one is well designed yet vague enough to allow me to envision myself in that world. I like less detailed worlds because I would much rather know about a ton of different realties partially, than to only understand a few realties completely. That is why I love reading short science fiction and fantasy; they give me so many amazing worlds to explore.

            I took Speculative Fiction Studies because I wanted to have an excuse to start reading again. When I was younger I used to spend hours on the couch reading The Magic Treehouse series by Mary Pope Osborne. I would read them from the minute I got home, till when my parents finally forced me to do my homework. I loved the books and I thought that I would never stop reading them, until one day I did. I stopped not because I finished the series, I was only half way through, but simply because I got bored. The adventures became repetitive, tension was loss, and as I became more and more familiar with the rules of the world it ceased to amaze me like it once did. This happened again and again until eventually, I mostly stopped reading. I figured that the class would help me rediscover my passion for reading by exposing me to books that I would never had picked up at the library.

            While I did like the books we read, I actually enjoyed the short stories far more. This actually surprised me as I had avoided short stories in the past, as I thought they would not be long enough to make interesting worlds and characters. However, I soon discovered that this was not the case. In short stories I can get a small taste of a world and then create the rest of the world in my mind, as opposed to being told every exact way in which this world operates.

            What I love about short fiction and fantasy is that there is almost no fluff; the author gets straight to the point. This is great because it allows me to emotionally connect to story without meaningless sections that break my connection. Take for example Tom Godwin’s The Cold Equations. This story has you constantly on edge hoping against all odds that there is some way for Marilyn to survive. When she is ejected from the spaceship, for the greater good of course, you can’t help but feel genuinely sad for this girl that you just met a few minutes ago. Though we know hardly anything about her past, we understand that she had one and thus we are free to imagine one. We can use the small amount of details we’re given to construct a past that we can personally relate to.

            Sometimes, if I read a book too slowly, I can forget what it was actually about. That’s not the case for short stories, especially not for one like Pretty Boy Crossover by Pat Cadigan. In the story society has become obsessed with being youthful, partying, and having no responsible. In this society once someone is 18 they almost always choose to be digitize, so that they can remain free from illness, death, and stay forever young. The story explores one’s humanity and it does so in a very interesting way. It follows Pretty Boy who is trying to decide whether or not he wants to become digitized. The entire time I was reading this I was completely engrossed in the story. When I finished the story I kept thinking about it for the rest of the day. I dreamt about how other aspects of society might be. Who runs the nation? Is everything just a plot to make the people sheep? Pretty Boy Crossover filled me with questions and I kept thinking about the story and its implications for a long time. Short fiction stays in my mind and it helps me look at the world in a more colorful way.