Pier Cefalo’s City of Vain Dreamers tackles the narcissistic values of our society with a twist of time traveling and different dimensions. Cefalo’s work mainly draws inspiration from many real-life situations, making his story seem more realistic. City of Vain Dreamers follows the adventures of three teenagers that discover a passageway to another dimension. As they travel to a different dimension, they discover that humans have become nothing more than an experiment for scientists. Cefalo’s writing is engaging and powerful, keeping readers on the edge of their seats as they flip the pages of the book.
Science fiction stands out from all the literary genres, as it is the only genre that can give us a look into the future, where our society is functioning differently. Maybe after an apocalypse or after establishing colonies on different planets. The stories in science fiction are always backed by science, there is always a believable explanation. If you are looking to write a sci-fi flick, here are some of the most important characteristics of this genre to help you, by Shmoop:
· Setting in an Alternative World
Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore. Oh, wait. You're not Toto. You're a robot dog with five heads. What's going on here?!
Science fiction, that's what. One thing we'll find over and over again in sci-fi is a setting that is strange, different, or faraway. Sci-fi writers are all about imagining an alternative world and bringing us readers to it.
That world can be in the future. It can be on a different planet. It can be in the past. We can't talk about sci-fi without talking about the fantastic settings that sci-fi writers love conjuring up. This is one of the major characteristics that divide science fiction from plain ol' fiction.
· Non-human Characters
It's a cliché that sci-fi fiction and film are full of aliens. There's a reason that cliché exists—it's because it's true. Aliens are among the non-human characters that we'll find in sci-fi. But sci-fi isn't just about aliens. It's about robots, for example, or people who are just a little bit more (or less!) than humans, like Frankenstein’s monster.
Sci-fi, in other words, is very much about exploring the limits of being human. What exists beyond us regular folk living on earth? Suppose there are "extraterrestrial" creatures. Would they be like us or would they be different from us? And what about machines? Can't they have feelings, too? By focusing not only on human but non-human characters, sci-fi writers force us to consider what we even mean by the "human."
· Allegory
Sci-fi works may be set in fantastic locations far away from where we mere mortals live, but that doesn't mean that they have nothing to do with us. That's because even when sci-fi writers write about distant worlds, they're really often writing about our own world.
Sci-fi tends to be allegorical: the best sci-fi works often have a hidden meaning, because they work as a commentary on our own world and our own social and political systems. These sci-fi writers are a pretty sneaky bunch. They transport us to distant worlds only to get us thinking about the way that we live in this world.
· Dystopia
Sci-fi writers like talking about our world by pretending to talk about another world. They're sneaky and nuanced like that.
And one of the sci-fi writers' favorite ways to do this is to depict dystopia. Some of us may have heard the word before, but for those of us who haven't, dystopia is the opposite of utopia. A utopian society is wonderful: people are free and happy and the sun's shining and everything's just dandy. In a dystopia people are oppressed, they're miserable, and everything they do is controlled by some authority.
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