Dead Man's Path

The story of the old vs the new is the main theme here, as well as what happens when you try to completely abolish the old ways all at once. The whole snooty reactoin of the new ways certainly didn't help matters, and the way they just replaced everything at once without compromise is reminiscent of the way colonization worked.

broke back mountain

What do i even need to say here? It's the gay cowboy story! a powerful romance between two married men, but not to each other obviously. Pretty much everyone has heard of this one, but i'd like to hear the analysis before i say anything interesting.

Everything that rises must converge

This is an interesting take on racism with a hint of realism. more to follow after class.

The voorman problem

Wow... I... I really don't know how to react to that. One one hand it was impressive visually and such, but... I'm not sure what the real point was. Why did this all happen? Why did the psychiatrist deserve this? What even happened here? ...I'm going to need more opinions before I do anything with this.

there will be soft rain

Ah, the post apocalyptic tale. Not even the standard, what would humans do in the apocalypse, but rather one of... what happens to everything else? This ONE house survived by sheer luck, and it was automated for who knows how long. It was eerie just how much it was taking care of itself... and ironically the one thing that killed it was the only other survivor of the bombs, the dog. When the dog died, it triggered the chain of events that lead to the house's destruction. Even when something survives the apocalypse, it still has an ending. Something as automated and self sufficient as the house still died eventually.

All eventually rots away and fades, and that is a fact of life one must accept. Humanity appeared to have already done so at this point, so it was only a matter of time before the machinery they left behind did as well.

The second variety

The second variety is a story of justified paranoia and cycles. One, the paranoia against the claws, where anyone you know could be one. Two, the cycles of creation and destruction at their own hands. The claws developed weapons to destroy other claws, and also ended up betraying each other all the time. In retrospect, the robot knew full well who the other one was, and killed a human claiming it was him, showing an aliance. However the IV-V killed a group of claws and another claw, specifically to gain trust, showing they aren't afraid to sacrifice for their own good.

This is remarkably similar to the humans, developing a weapon, the claws, to kill the russians and eventually getting killed by it themselves. The claws are in the same boat, they make weapons that can kill each other, and probably will after killing the humans. It is a bit of irony, how the weapons make weapons to destroy other weapons. Whether or not the Dick wanted to say that humans are like mindless weapons themselves is unclear, but i would hope not. The humans didn't want to kill ALL humans, just the russians, and mostly because they chased them off the planet.

The claws didn't seem to have much of a reason to want to kill each other, other than maybe gaining trust to they could kill more humans. However, they mass produced the weapons they needed, so they can't ONLY want to do it to kill humans, they clearly are being careful like the human masters were.

the most dangerous game

Oh... I am SO SO SORRY! I've been so sick the past few days, and I... I passed out I could barely move earlier. I can type today,  but i can barely get out of bed right now.

The most dangerous game.

The contrast of having the protagonist hunted by both man AND beast is part of what makes this story so interesting.

How he was a hunter himself also to become hunted by other hunters is a good irony for itself. In most stories it would show a man slowly becoming more native as he descended into madness for the sake of survival. However in THIS story the madman is already there, and he must escape him. So while he becomes somewhat native, he only does so to survive, and escape his predators. He even manages to keep his mind and sneak back to his hunter's house.

While the story itself doesn't explain much about what happened next, it does at least tell us that Rainsford won the duel. The only reason I can assume that the story didn't feel like telling us what happened during the duel is either the author couldn't make a very good action scene, which is false, or he felt like just cutting to the victor with a clever quip would make a better ending, which it did.