Whatsup class. My name is Donovan Valle and I’m currently studying Entertainment Technology at City Tech. One of my main passions is music. Love listening to it, making it, everything to do with it. I started out playing classical piano and saxophone but I love making instrumental electronic music and hip hop. Favorite rock band is Led Zeppelin and my favorite hip hop artists is still Kanye West. I also love to DJ on the side when I can and when things aren’t so hectic in life (life of a college student). I’m also a huge basketball fan (favorite team is the Knicks…they’ll get better) and baseball fan (Yankees). I currently am working at a clothing store called Urban Outfitters which is pretty cool cause I can get a discount, but I also hope to be interning at Madison Square Garden and doing some production work for the New York Knicks later this Spring.

One of my weaknesses as a writer is that I take too long to come up with a main idea. Once I have it my thoughts can come pretty easily, but that first part is what kills me. One thing I hate about reading critically is having to read long boring stuff. I’m a picky reader as it is so I have to find things that are engaging and interesting for me to read in order to really analyze it well. The last great book I read was on the life of RZA called The Tao of Wu, which is a great book about how hip hop producer RZA used eastern influences like meditation and Kung Fu to create probably the most famous hip hop group of all time Wu-Tang Clan.

I think Science Fiction is a genre of storytelling that has a huge emphasis on technology and the impact it has on our world and our society. Science is the way in which these fantastic and otherworldly stories and experiences can even exist (whether or not the science already exists or is predicted for the future.)

When answering the question of why this class is only filled with men, my honest answer is I think it’s probably just a coincidence. A very unlikely coincidence, but nonetheless.

Some of my favorite Science Fiction works happen to be mostly films; 2001: A Space Odyssey by Kubrick, Planet of the Apes, Close Encounters, movies like that. For literature, I’ve read A Clockwork Orange which was really crazy but I did enjoy it, and 1984 which is one of my favorite books. From this course I hope to get more of an understanding of the Sci-Fi genre and look into many more films and books in this genre.