Aniruddha Joshi
English 1102
Dr Reynolds
February 25, 2009
The reading, Ted Chiangs “seventy-two letters”, was quite frankly weird. Being steampunk, I did expect it to be this way but in the end I was still confused in some ways. The story was quite similar in structure and plot with the stories portrayed by many Japanese anime movies today. I also noticed that the story had strong steampunk characteristics. For instance, the story was set in England which is typical of steampunk. While reading the story a few questions came to my mind.
Willoughby pressures Stranton and tells him that his idea of making automata to do the “easy work” of the people is not a just idea. Stranton believes that his idea is going to be a positive effect on the world. The question which I was posed with was if Stranton was just in his efforts. Stranton’s efforts were not much different from efforts to increase mechanization throughout human history and I feel that there was nothing wrong in doing so. Stranton also explained that he did not intend to replace sculptors but rather only to aid the manual aspect of it.
Furthermore, I quite found the ending to be quite a steampunk ending and I was not completely satisfied with it. I understand that it is a style of ending but I was left hanging in my opinion when the problem at hand was not fully resolved.