Panspermia

<p>Panspermia is a collection of short stories set (mostly) in a near-future world. The stories included follow an arc starting in an early 90s arcade and ending with the founding of a new civilization on a distant planet. Technology plays a major part in each of the stories—ranging from video games to a Neuromancer-level artificial intelligence—providing the characters with means for work, leisure and, in one odd case, a romantic relationship. Most of the stories come to the reader through a variety of first-person narrators, thus offering a look at the world through many sets of eyes while also incorporating several unique voices. While some characters—both narrator and otherwise—do appear in more than one story, such appearances are often in very different capacities on a per-story basis. </p> <p>The stories are arranged in an order denoting the rising and falling of the world—society as a whole—around the characters. Those stories appearing before the central story, “Gerald’s War,” show the world at, or rising to, its peak; the stories following that middle point offer a character-driven look at a post-apocalyptic world, showing how those involved cope with the loss of technology (in direct comparison to the loss of loved ones) and how that impacts their worldview. Though post-apocalyptic tales have saturated the current market, the focus for Panspermia’s stories set in such an era spend less time focusing on surviving the barren landscape and more time focusing on the relationships between characters and what fragments of their previous existences still survive. </p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Level thesis:degree_level

Master's

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English and Theatre

Grantor dc:publisher

Eastern Kentucky University

Year

2016

Author dc:creator

• Hood, Lance

• Fiction

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2016 Lance Hood

Repository record dc:identifier

https://encompass.eku.edu/etd/379

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:encompass.eku.edu:etd-1377