A speculative mind

  There seems to be varying opinions about prologues. Some readers hate them, won’t even read them. Why? It is part of the story. If the author had titled it “Chapter 1” instead of “Prologue” they would have read it without question. I guess it is because people feel that if it is a prologue, it is not really part of the story and they don’t want to waste their time on preliminaries. I am sure those same people would not read the “Acknowledgements” or the “Forward” or the “Afterword” either. I can understand being anxious to get to the story. Something made you interested enough to buy or to checkout or to borrow this book. You want to get to the meat. But the prologue (if there is one) is part of the story. It often tells us something about a character or a situation that we may need to know later. It may be there to set the emotional stage for the story. It is a gem, a kernel of information. Then again, I have read some prologues that were not all that enlightening or useful to...

  I wouldn’t call The Institute by Stephen King a horror story. There is a bit of paranormal activity in it, but evil that we see does not come from the people who possess paranormal powers, but from others who control them. The people who have psychic abilities are all children. The real horror of this story is that those children are kidnapped and abused. The main character in the story is Luke, a twelve-year-old who has a remarkable brain. The kid is a budding genius who even though he is in a school for the gifted, has moved beyond what that school can teach him. In the next year he plans on entering MIT to study engineering and Emerson to study English at the same time! But he is kidnapped and taken to a mysterious institution in the backcountry of Maine where he meets other kids who have also been kidnapped. Has Luke been taken because of his remarkable brain? No. The Institute doesn’t care about that. They only care that he has a mild ability to move small objects with hi...

  The two dystopian novels of the early 20 th Century that set the standard for dystopian novels, were Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. It is interesting that neither author was primarily known science fiction writer. I read Brave New World when I was in High school. It was not required reading. I just read it on my own to check a famous science fiction book off my list. I don’t think I got much out of it. I know I didn’t get much out of it, just the basic plot: A society where happiness is the only good. Everyone has sex with everyone else. A “savage” makes an appearance and it upsets the applecart. I doubt if I got much of the nuance or the humor. I definitely would not have gotten the Shakespeare references. In fact, there are a lot of references my 17-year-old self would not have gotten. I just finished reading it again. With age comes more understanding. The compelling insight into this “Utopian” society comes from the outsid...