Speculative fiction doesn’t just entertain—it shapes how we imagine the future of our planet. After reading:
Helen Simpson’s “Diary of an Interesting Year”
Mike McClelland’s “The Secrets of the Last Greenland Shark”
Choose one idea or theme that both stories explore such as survival, community, extinction, hope, collapse, adaptation, or memory and write a 300–400 word post comparing how each author handles that idea.
Your post must:
Cite at least one direct passage from each story to support your points.
Analyze how each author uses narrative techniques of world building to shape the reader’s emotional response.
Reflect on your own reaction: What did
Sample Answer
The theme of survival resonates profoundly through both Helen Simpson’s “Diary of an Interesting Year” and Mike McClelland’s “The Secrets of the Last Greenland Shark,” yet each author handles this core idea with distinct narrative techniques, shaping vastly different emotional responses in the reader.
In Simpson’s “Diary of an Interesting Year,” survival is presented as a brutal, visceral, and unceasing daily grind in a world ravaged by environmental and societal collapse. The first-person diary format immediately immerses the reader in the protagonist's harrowing reality, fostering an intimate and raw emotional connection. World-building through mundane, repetitive details — the constant search for food, the desperate need for warmth, the pervasive fear of desperate outsiders — paints a relentlessly bleak picture. The narrative technique of focusing on the minutiae of scarcity, such as the protagonist observing, "The last of the carrots are almost gone now; we'll try to boil the nettles again tomorrow, if there are any left," strips away any romanticism from survival. It evokes a potent sense of dread and claustrophobia, as the reader experiences the erosion of civility and the constant pressure of dwindling resources through the protagonist’s immediate, terrified perspective. Survival here is about basic physiological needs and the crushing psychological toll of a disintegrating world.
Conversely, McClelland’s “The Secrets of the Last Greenland Shark” explores survival on a much grander, more melancholic scale, focusing on the last living member of an ancient species in a profoundly altered future. The third-person perspective and the almost scientific, detached tone create a sense of vastness and a quiet, haunting wonder. McClelland builds his world by emphasizing the immense geological time the Greenland shark has endured and the irreversible loss of its kind and ecosystem. The narrative technique of imbuing the shark with inherited memories, as when the text describes, "She held the last memory of the ice, a living relic in a world that had forgotten its cold, its vast, silent expanse," transforms her survival into a poignant elegy for a lost past. This approach evokes a deep sense of environmental grief and the heavy burden of being the last. The emotional response is less about immediate fear and more about a profound, existential sadness for what humanity has lost and the silent resilience of nature in its final moments.