1. The term dystopia refers to an imaginary place where people suffer from all kinds of dehumanization, pain, torture, oppression, and diseases while they have a feeling of unhappiness and unpleasantness regarding themselves being unfairly treated in the overcrowded surroundings. The dystopias do exist in the real world in places like Gaza, where the common man is subjected to prejudice, poverty, intimidation, hunger, hopelessness, depravity, insecurity, and consistent surveillance by the oppressive rulers. The story, Speech Sounds, definitely connects to the state of dystopia where the people are in misery because their ability to communicate has been hampered and this is resulting in severe disasters.
2. The communication plays the most crucial role in the story because generally (in the regular world) communication is a two-way dialogue where both the participants are able to listen, process, and talkback their responses to each other (Evans 566). Then in the case of the post-pandemic era where the hearing and speech abilities are impaired, the lack of communication may result in more disastrous consequences because chances of misinterpretation and misunderstanding are high when the modes of communication among the people are obstructed.
Robert Heinlein: “All You Zombies”
1. Pop the Bartender, said that he never liked the looks of the ‘unmarried mother’ because he was commenting on the physical appearance of the 25 years old lad who used a pen-name of the ‘unmarried mother’ in his articles for some confession magazine (Evans 324). However, this assertion seems ironic on retrospection because the lad was actually a born girl who underwent the sex-change operation after he was impregnated by an old man. Thus, the bartender was actually hating the looks of an intersex who was forced to change his sexual identity without his consent.
2. In the story All you zombies, the bartender wore a ring which had the image of the snake devouring his own tale as an emblem of the self-sufficiency of the human life to create different stages of life on its own, by using the acute prowess of science (time-travel). This phenomenon of self-sufficiency is actually explained via the plot of this story. The story is narrated by the bartender who comes across the lad who presented himself as the unmarried mother and was actually a born girl who was impregnated by an old man. Later it is revealed that the boy, the girl, the bartender, and the old man who seduced the girl were all actually a single person who was time-travelling into various parts of his past. Thus, the bartender was actually his own mother, father, and son.
Works Cited
Evans, B. Arthur et. al. " The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction".1st edition: Wesleyan university press, 2010. 324-579. Print.
