Challenge 224

Because It’s There

As we bid farewell to Sam Ivey’s Gilboy’s Quest and to Bernard Gilboy himself, we have a few questions by way of a parting salutation:
1. How does Gilboy’s “quest” change in nature after his boat capsizes in chapter V?
2. How is Gilboy’s ultimate end ironic? In what way does it fit his life?
3. Why can Bernard Gilboy not explain his undertaking his voyage?
4. Which does Bernard Gilboy resemble more: Christopher Columbus or Edmund Hillary?
5. What might be an equivalent of Gilboy’s voyage today?
In Mark Eller’s “The Price of Her Pride”:
1. What are the distinguishing features of the society in which the story is set?
2. Is it really plausible that the air is so poisonous that everyone must wear gas masks? Symbolism aside, what else in the story would have to change if the air were breathable?
3. Is it significant that Sydney and Jane are going out to the theatre? How might the play itself be significant?
4. Attention conspiracy theorists: is “reality TV” a subterfuge to indoctrinate society in universal, ubiquitous surveillance?
In James Swingle’s “Picking Up a Seventeen-Foot Tall Woman”:
1. Why is it signficant that the woman is very tall at the beginning of the story?
2. At the end, what emotion is conveyed in the image of the “carnival prize”?
In what way is the narrator in Patrick Dent’s “A Lie — the Ultimate Marriage” not only a liar but a criminal?
Val Bonney’s “Bag Lady”:
1. Explain the ending “and maybe give him one of her newspapers, if she can spare it.”
2. Pastiche challenge: retell the story in the first person from the bag lady’s point of view and then from the shopkeeper’s point of view.
Bill Bowler’s “Science Fictional Politics” points out that Steven Francis Murphy’s “Sharpshooter” is set in a not too distant future. In what ways has the politics of Vannoy’s world changed since our time? In what ways has it not changed at all since 2003?

Responses welcome!