 A clearly defined event: What happened? Who was involved?

 Me, Ray Bradbury, Sim

 A clearly described setting: When and where did it happen?
 My dorm on a hungover Sunday morning
 Vivid, descriptive details: What makes the story come alive? Use examples from
work that you did.
 A consistent point of view: Who’s telling the story?
 me
 A clear point: Why does the story matter?
 Made me want to achieve goals, work harder, and make time count
Sam Santavicca

Engcomp 420

Amy Flick

December 3, 2019

2019: A Reading Odyssey

Since I first saw Star Wars: A New Hope in the fourth grade, I have always been

fascinated with science fiction and fantasy. My favorite movie is Interstellar, and my favorite

book is Wool, by Hugh Howey. It is the story of a post-apocalypse society living underground in

a 100-story bunker with no elevators. I thoroughly enjoy fantasy video games such as The Elder

Scrolls V: Skyrim, a medieval game of knights and wizards, and Destiny 2, a space adventure

game involving warping across the solar system to defeat the enemies of Earth. Science fiction

has always been something that fascinated me. I read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five for

my literature review during my junior year of high school. I was a physics major for my first

semester at Virginia Tech, and my favorite lecture was one where we discussed Einstein’s theory

of relativity and performed calculations of spacecraft near lightspeed to better understand time

travel. When I left for my second year of college at a new school, my dad handed me one of his
favorite books from when I was his age: The Golden Apples of the Sun and R is for Rocket by

Ray Bradbury. It is a collection of short stories and novellas by Bradbury. He told me that he

read it his first year in college and that he found it fascinating. I found it to be on par with the

early Cold War era stories like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick and I,

Robot by Isaac Asimov. That is, until I read the final story in the anthology: Frost and Fire. I had

never read a story so thrilling as that one, and it contributed to the way that I viewed my

undergraduate experience in relation to my post graduate goals.

Frost and Fire is the story of a man named Sim, the descendent of a thousand generations

of shipwrecked explorers on a very extreme planet. The proximity to the nearest star makes

being outside of a cave during the day too hot. The people burn up if they stay outside for too

long. The nights are equally brutal: the extreme cold freezes anything outside. The only time the

people can leave their caves in during the hours of dawn and dusk. On top of this, the levels of

radiation on the planet accelerate the lives of the humans so that they live for only 8 days. The

people before Sim created a shared memory that allows him to know the things that his ancestors

knew, which leads him to the discovery that there is one unharmed spaceship that is left a few

days journey from his cave. The problem is that Sim can only travel during dusk and dawn. His

challenger, Chion, entices him to invade another group of human’s caves that contains minerals

allowing him to live for 3 extra days and puts him a day closer to the ship. Chion, his group of

fighters, Sim, and his mate, Lyte, successfully take over the other cave and gain some extra time

in their lives. Sim eventually makes it to the ship, and upon being expose to the radiation-free air,

passes out for a day but stops aging as quickly as he did. To get back to his people and save

them, he fires a laser beam from the ship up the valley to his home cave, providing enough heat

to run in the time before dawn and for a little while after dusk. Sim reaches his cave and save his
sister, who is now an old woman, and the rest of his clan. They board the ship and pass out for a

day due to decreased radiation. As they adjust to the new climate, Sim launches the ship and

leaves the planet behind.

It was a very hungover Sunday morning in October when I read this story, the longest in

the Bradbury anthology. I was amazed at the way the lives on the people were cut down into 8

and then 11 days. Sim’s life was too short to amount to anything, yet he saved his people by

devoting his entire 8 days to just the chance that he could do something. He could only go

outside for 2 hours a day, and that time was spent on gathering food. Sim’s sacrifice reminded

me of a quote by Jackie Robinson: “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other

lives”. The immense weight that Bradbury is able to put into Sim’s life defines his story. If I only

lived for 8 days, what would I do with that time? Most importantly, if I had to condense my life

down into 8 moments, what would I want them to be? Making a period of time short makes the

individual parts that make it up inherently more important. In thinking about this and the Jackie

Robinson quote, I realized that Sunday morning that I wanted my life to have a larger impact

than what a normal life has. In that moment, I knew that working a corporate job, marrying,

raising children, and dying around the age of 76 would not be enough for me. I knew that I

wanted to be a lawyer, but until this point, I had no idea what kind of law I wanted to practice.

Coupling my desire to practice law and make an impact in the world, I decided that I wanted to

be a civil rights lawyer. That way, I am able to, as Teddy Roosevelt once put it, “Far and away

the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing