Craving Conflict

One example of a character experiencing a large amount of conflict is Dr. Frankenstein. What is strange about him is that his real conflict is his own success. He has spent years trying to develop a way to bring life to things that have stopped living. It is to the point where it takes up nearly all of his existence. Because of this one might believe that the conflict of the story would have something to do with his inability to make this possible. However, it is not until he does actually make this happen that the true story begins.
Dr. Frankenstein finally creates life when he brings his creature from the dead. Instead of rejoicing over his success and embracing the creature, he runs out of the room and hides from it, hallucinating in fear of its approach. He actually goes crazy from the creation, and avoids it for months (how long exactly I do not know, seeing as it was only an excerpt that we read). I can assume though, that the new conflict of the story becomes Dr. Frankenstein's hunt of the creature, and that it will only be resolved when he is once again dead.
I fear that Dr. Frankenstein will be in a sort of infinite state of conflict, because it is not as though he wanted any less to make his discovery, he simply realized the potentially awful effects of it. Therefore, he may never be happy, seeing as what he wants is evil, but evil is not something that he wishes to indulge in.

In a far less obvious way to the story, I think Brad from Algorithms for Love is another character that faces a lot of conflict. In along the same lines as Dr. Frankenstein, what he wants is to make his wife happy, but he knows that making her happy may be allowing her to do something crazy (such as creating the Aimee doll). In both cases these people can never 100% do what they want, because the block for their success is its own effects.

Encounters of the First Kind

As ignorant as this may sound, the idea of being a science fiction fan had always sounded so nerdy to me.  However, on the first day of class, I was hit with the realization that not only were most of my favorite movies of the science fiction genre, but also most of the countries' favorites as well.

I had been going around thinking that science fiction only included things like Star Wars (which, don't get me wrong...is one of my favorite series), and that something more beautiful and fantastical such as Avatar was strictly fantasy.  Upon reading our first assignment though, I learned that this is not the case.  Science fiction is now for me defined as a story involving our world, and another, but focusing on the difference between the two.  It does not only include outer space and robots as more sheltered me had once believed.

Even the ones that do, such as Liar!, ended up being more exciting to me than I had originally imagined.  What an interesting concept, much more detailed and original than (again) and I had once supposed a science fiction story to be.  

Both of these notions have gotten me so much more excited to be taking this class.  I am a lot more open minded about what I am going to encounter, and even about things I have already encountered.  Things like the Matrix and Back to the Future which have been favorite movies of mine growing up are now included in this enticing new (for me at least) genre.

I don't really have any concerns for this class, as the only thing that may have concerned me (lack of interest for just a bunch of robots and chemicals and outer space items) has been completely disproven.  All that's left is curiosity for what else I am about to discover!!