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Summary: Have you ever wanted to be an architect? Well, if you do, then this story is just the adventure you would like! This story is based on a group of architects trying to find ideas to make a house NEVER built before. Teal, one of the architects, comes to a revolution! He wants to build a house that uses the 4th dimension. Teal describes the 4th dimension as a dimension based around time itself. This is viewed as an impossible thing! For time is not something you can hold onto or control. Teal ignores that fact and continues on with his plan. He creates a plan that takes a tesseract, which is a square figure that has 4 dimensions, and basically unfolds it. Teal successfully makes the house, and all is well. Teal is ready to show his clients, and friends, the house he has created just for them. Although when he arrives, the house is not like how it was before, “But it did him no good. Front or back, the story was the same: the other seven rooms had disappeared, vanished completely” (Heinlein). So the magnificent house he has built is gone! Well, then they go inside the house and after looking around a little bit, strange things automatically start to happen. They can’t get out of the house, they start seeing themselves inside the house, and more! Suddenly they open the window. They are not where they were before. They soon come to find out…they are in a different dimension. Instead of looking at this in a bad way, Teal looks at this as a good event. A learning experience! But now the problem that faces them is how to get home.
How is this story Science Fiction: There are many elements that come in for the genre of science fiction? My story is science fiction for many reasons. Let’s start by what is science? Science isn’t the study of anything, and it’s not just a subject. Science is how you study and experiment your questions. Science is also a way of thinking. Now, if you think about it, the goal of science is to explain why things happen in nature. Why the sky is blue, why we need oxygen, etc. So in science fiction, there is a lot of explaining. In my story, Crooked House, there is a lot of explaining while Teal is explaining how he is going to build this house for the Baileys and why it works. Another story I read was A Sound of Thunder. This is a story about a company that has a time machine, and for a certain amount of money, you can go back in time and hunt a dinosaur! Well, this experience soon goes downhill quickly when the main character, Eckles, soon comes to realize that he wasn’t ready for any of what he signed up for, and blindly wanders off the path. This comes with serious consequences Eckles soon comes to realize after he gets back, “Eckles moaned, he dropped to his knees. He scrabbled at the golden butterfly with shaking fingers. “Can’t we,” he pleaded to the world, to himself, to the officials, to the Machine, “Can’t we take it back, can’t we make it alive again? Can’t we start over? Can’t we- “(Bradbury 9) This story is science fiction because this also explains a lot with time travel and the consequences that can come with changing anything. Even if it’s as small as a mere butterfly. Not only that, but both stories have some form of futuristic machinery. With Crooked House, it’s the house that’s futuristic due to the fact that it has the ability to travel into different dimensions, and with A Sound of Thunder, it’s the time machine because it can travel through different time periods.
5 Lit. Terms:
How is this story Science Fiction: There are many elements that come in for the genre of science fiction? My story is science fiction for many reasons. Let’s start by what is science? Science isn’t the study of anything, and it’s not just a subject. Science is how you study and experiment your questions. Science is also a way of thinking. Now, if you think about it, the goal of science is to explain why things happen in nature. Why the sky is blue, why we need oxygen, etc. So in science fiction, there is a lot of explaining. In my story, Crooked House, there is a lot of explaining while Teal is explaining how he is going to build this house for the Baileys and why it works. Another story I read was A Sound of Thunder. This is a story about a company that has a time machine, and for a certain amount of money, you can go back in time and hunt a dinosaur! Well, this experience soon goes downhill quickly when the main character, Eckles, soon comes to realize that he wasn’t ready for any of what he signed up for, and blindly wanders off the path. This comes with serious consequences Eckles soon comes to realize after he gets back, “Eckles moaned, he dropped to his knees. He scrabbled at the golden butterfly with shaking fingers. “Can’t we,” he pleaded to the world, to himself, to the officials, to the Machine, “Can’t we take it back, can’t we make it alive again? Can’t we start over? Can’t we- “(Bradbury 9) This story is science fiction because this also explains a lot with time travel and the consequences that can come with changing anything. Even if it’s as small as a mere butterfly. Not only that, but both stories have some form of futuristic machinery. With Crooked House, it’s the house that’s futuristic due to the fact that it has the ability to travel into different dimensions, and with A Sound of Thunder, it’s the time machine because it can travel through different time periods.
5 Lit. Terms:
- Figurative Language: Figurative language is when you say something, but it means something else. Some examples are metaphors, similes, idioms, etc. Figurative language is used to add more color to a story. Make it not so bland. In Crooked House, it is used when Teal is talking to Mr. Bailey about buying the house, “Say, who wears the pants in your family anyhow?” (Heinlein) What Teal means when he says this is who’s in charge of the family? He’s mocking Bailey for his fear of his wife.
- Irony: Irony is when something happens in a story that we don’t expect, or somebody says something in a story that they don’t mean. Like if a fire truck suddenly erupted on fire, or if somebody is using sarcasm. In the story, we expect Teal to finish his house and for it to be there when the Baileys come look at it, instead, we see only part of a house. The rest of the house is gone," Gone was the crazy tower with its jutting second-story rooms. No trace remained of the seven rooms above ground floor level. Nothing remained but the
single room that rested on the foundations. 'Great jumping cats!' he yelled, "I've been robbed!" (Heinlein 5) - Plot: Plot is the story line of a story. You could also say this is the “map” of the story. This plot is really all over the place. Quite literally. They move from dimension to dimension, from city to country. It’s kind of confusing at first, but once you get a good grasp at what’s going on, the plot isn’t very hard to follow.
- Foil Character: A foil character are two characters that are very similar, but there is one big characteristic that keeps those two characters different. I think that Teal and Mr. Bailey is a great example! They are both architects, and they are both very intelligent. Although I think that one major thing that keeps them apart is that Teal is a very open minded person. Mr. Bailey is not so much. Teal thinks that he can make this extravagant house, but Mr. Bailey keeps saying that it’s impossible.
- Tone: Tone is how the author feels when he/she is writing a story. This story is very optimistic, and confusing. I also think that this story is very adventures and fast. I think that the author must have felt adventurous and crazy when they wrote this story. I think so because I felt that it was very fast, and very exhilarating!