Blog Entry #3

Within the first short story, "That Only a Mother," I felt as though I was tricked by the teacher into believing I had read the wrong story, or at least that the collectors of Science Fiction stories had made a large mistake in putting somewhat of a psychological family drama in this pantheon of Sci-Fi short stories, but after one or two re-reads of the material, I started to notice some of the key aspects that define the work as nothing but Science Fiction. The story is set in 1953-1954, and as Maggie reads in the special newspaper, its set around the continuing Atomic Bomb struggle in a World War III type scenario, leaving most of the newborns to have immense mutations, leaving the normalcy rate very small for babies being born after the attacks had started. The mother, Maggie, is trying to keep correspondence with her husband as she is trying to deliver their baby around this time, and as the baby is born and grows, she starts to notice a rapid growth in the babies intelligence but not in her motor skills. She tells the husband this, only the correspondence continues without much change in positive tone until the father finally comes back home after four years of being away and finally sees that the baby is actually mutated and has no limbs whatsoever. The reason I wanted to regurgitate all of that context was to show you that throughout the telegrams that Maggie sends Hank, It is only till the 29th of February do we notice Maggie begins to lie to Hank about the state of their child. We can see as the messages chronologically after that date, she consistently starts or ends a telegram stating how either the hospital had told him misinformation (if they told him anything at all), or that they don't know what they are doing and that the baby is fine. Why she lies, I can only interpret as a mother striving at all costs to cope with the immense trauma of nuclear mutation to the child she gave birth too by deluding herself to believing that her baby is healthy without it, especially since the intelligence of the baby is through the roof. If it was your own child and you found out this kind of information, would you not fight at all costs to keep it, even causing yourself to believe things that are just unlikely to be true. The husband, Hank, probably would have been more okay with finding out this kind of stuff through his wife, but the fact that she misleads him and herself in her own delusions, crushes Hank. I think the story has it's roots set in fear of the A-bomb of the late 40's and can be seen as a cry for peace as the thoughts of families bringing themselves to this kind of mental struggle due to things they themselves couldn't avoid due to purveying violence within the world, causing people to feel helpless, delusional, and paranoid, all of which work very well within the Science Fiction genre.

I guess the running theme within these stories are alternate realities in which the United States of America has just gone into turmoil, but this for other reasons. In this story we grasp that Large Corperations want to destroy the country that let them flourish, the Russians have dissolved and Arab's have a stronghold similar to the power they had during the middle ages and want to destroy the companies. Although those are huge themes, we follow the character Sayyid Qutb, whom is a terrorist preparing for a suicide attack within America. I find this story to be much more in the genre of Science Fiction that I am use too, closer to the dystopic kind of fiction I read in middle school in stories such as 1984 and Watchmen, except in this it seems to want to put the reader in the perspective of the terrorist to show you that his anger stems more from smaller corrupt acts like grimy customs officers to show that it's smaller acts like that added with the outside worlds perception of events that lead him to do what he plans on doing. In doing so, it forces the reader to debate whether the actions taken out are worthy of doing or are wrong and mean. I can't say which is right or wrong, but what do you guys think, blog readers? Comment below and let me know what you think, and thanks for reading!