During the summer I read quite a few things, 2 stood out to me: the expanse book series, as well as Tesla shareholder reports. Both of them are vastly different in style, audience, purpose, and intent. In this post, I’ll do a brief analysis of each of them looking at my opinion, what I took away, how I might have been inspired, what I found interesting, my personal response, and concepts in the texts.
The Expanse series, so far I have only read the first 2 books in the Expanse series, both of which are an interesting spin on the sci-fi genre. They both are quite grounded in terms of the overall scifi scale, if I had to place it somewhere it would probably be closer to “The Martian” than “Star Wars”. It’s set in the not so distant future where humanity has conquered our solar system but not quite the stars. The thing that I found fascinating about the expanse books is the political aspect which is brought to the sci-fi world. Both books look heavily into the concept of life in different environments and how that would change our interactions with others. This is done by jumping from perspective to perspective with each chapter, we see not only the perspective of a fighter-ship Capitan, but also a detective in the asteroid belt, and a UN representative from earth. By looking at the situations from the different perspecitve we can better understand their viewpoint and the way information is twisted before they receive it. One example is a distress signal from the fighter that was changed into anti-Mars propaganda by the time it reached the asteroid detective. By setting it in a moderately realistic setting, the book manages to make simple sci-fi tropes and elements more interesting and mysterious to the reader. In a very similar fashion to Game of Thrones staring out with midevil rivalries and ending with dragons, the undead, and giants. One of the prominent concepts which is brought up in origin and how it shapes who we are. I think if I took anything away from this book its the importance of restraint when writing especially with a long series like this( 8 books and counting).
The other thing that I read this summer Tesla Shareholders reports, which I read for my EE (Extended Essay) reading these reports not only helped me to better understand the world of business, but also marketing and the psychology of it. I found that these reports would never have negative aspects to them with a heavy focus on why everything that has happened has been for the better of the business. I think that this is really interesting due to the nature of the reports and who their audience is. With shareholders it’s extremely important that they have faith in the business to increase in value otherwise they would start to sell shares and the value of the business would drop. So when reading these reports I found that any negative impacts on the business were spun into positives.
