(With intended nod to this piece, which came up in class yesterday.) Heather Schell, a Stanford University graduate student in the late 1990s who now teaches writing at George Washington University in DC, wrote what I think is my favorite critique of Preston’s Hot Zone only a few years after it was published. Her piece […]
Read More →Archive for December, 2016
“A virus can be useful to a species by thinning it out.”
Viruses and diseases can play an important role in maintaining evolutionary order. Although it is difficult to imagine a worldwide epidemic that could thin out the human species, it has already occurred many times in recorded history. Richard Preston first published an article titled “Crisis in the Hot Zone,” which talks about the outbreak of […]
Read More →Kino der Toten
Whitehead’s Zone One is definitely an unusual post –apocalyptic scenario set in New York. The novel opens with the narrator describing Mark Spitz’s dream of wanting to live in New York City. We as the audience are walked through a pre-apocalyptic Manhattan apartment that belonged to his uncle. A considerably wealthy man, living the […]
Read More →What about the healthy teenagers?
Teenagers in Black Hole are portrayed somewhat similar to one another: they have same haircut, same facial features, same register in their speech, and almost all of them are attracted to sex and drug. They only become distinctly distinguishable later in the book after they have contracted the disease and undergone physical transformation that makes them look, […]
Read More →What’s with the Metamorphosis?
Needless to say, the plot of this graphic novel is extremely chaotic– we are presented with two distinct narrators whose lives seem to merge but who follow different trains of thought, the narrative of the story is messy and difficult to follow, there’s way too much nudity, and the characters within the story–being teenagers–are acting […]
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