Challenge 1158

From the Future

1. In Ruairi MacInnes’s A New Size in Library Management: Why does this otherwise realistic story resort to a magical conclusion?

2. In Edward Ahern’s Swiftly Reading: Can the reader think of or find elsewhere examples of “impossible flying machines, obvious villains / and a moral code Christ might have envied”?

3. In Channie Greenberg’s Wonk and Soke, the word “soke” is Old English and is italicized because it’s no longer used. What might “wonk” mean?

4. In Ilya J. Hakky’s My Experienced Visitor:

   1. Of the four characters in the story, why is the neighbor, “Pam,” the only one who is named?
   2. What is the narrative significance of the mother’s holding postal packages for Pam when Pam can’t receive them personally?
   3. Why might a German shepherd be depicted as inflicting a scar that serves to identify two characters as the same person? Why might the scar not be incurred more simply, as in an accident with a sharp object?
   4. How does the hand scar determine the genre of the story as time travel? What would the story’s genre become without the scar?
   5. The process of time travel is taken for granted in the narrative. In issue 76, how do “Don’t Get Noticed,” and its later sequels describe time-travel?



Responses welcome!

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