Week Ten: The Fiction of Ideas

For this week I read Aye and Gomorrah by Samuel R Delany and The Drowned Giant by J G Ballard. Both stories were actually a little disturbing.  Aye and Gomorrah was a little harder to connect to than The Drowned Giant. It took me a few pages to actually understand what was going on and what the frelks and spacers were as opposed to knowing exactly what was going on in the other story due to the straightforwardness of the author. Ballard was much more to the point and with a clinical detached tone as described in the preliminary writing. What I found most disturbing about that story was the fact that no one had any respect for the dead. Children were playing on a corpse and others would have picnics. No one cared that that giant had a life before his death and basically treated him like he was nothing. Although it is disturbing to me, there are people in this world who treat things this was and justify it by saying things like “Oh, it doesn’t matter, they’re already dead”. While that may be true, just because it does not matter to one person, does not mean it mattered to no one. I’m not saying one has to pretend like it matters, but just to be respectful that it may matter to someone else. As for the Aye and Gomorrah it was less disturbing but it still dealt with the idea of fetishizing these groups of people and prostitution.