REVIEW: Halloween Kills Is Melting
Although far from perfect, Halloween Kills is the film that finally delivers on the promise of the 1978 original's iconic ending. by val Loughcrewe The Shape is a God. John Carpenter and Deborah Hill knew this without realizing it when, at the end
REVIEW: Dune (2021)
Denis Villeneuve succeeds in bringing Frank Herbert's sci-fi epic back to the screen, but at the cost of some of its strangeness. by Kurt Schiller In one sense, I have seen Dune twice. In another, I have seen it dozens of times. I
Guest Curator: Jess Levine
A cyberpunk playlist for cyberpunk times. by Jess Levine As a genre, synthwave fits naturally into the mold of both the storytelling “concept album” and the instrumental album. Synthwave and its brethren are love letters to the soundtracks of the Eighties
Nowhere Here: Cyberspace & the Assassination of the Unreal
The 40-year rise and fall of cyberspace's symbolic unreality. by Kurt Schiller Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from
The Flesh Revolts
How Akira's sci-fi horror explores body, artifice, and exploitation under capitalism by Meabh Cadigan To become something more than—or other than—human is a terrifying proposition. We don’t know where we come from or why we think, and so we hold
Ghost in the Shell: The Horror of Mass Production
Masamune Shirow's cyberpunk masterpiece envisions a world where people, not just products, are mass produced by Nicola Kapron We now live in a world where nearly everything you can touch is being mass produced—everything except people. Masamune Shirow's 1989 manga
The Hegelian Emptiness of Cyberpunk 2077
Cyberpunk faces a choice between stark materialism and subjectivity by Lapo Lappin The release of the long-awaited Cyberpunk 2077 was expected to be something of a turning point for the cyberpunk genre. Christening a work after a whole subculture is a
Fear of a Black Mirror
How sci-fi visions of vengeful androids recall white delusions of a Post-Reconstruction world by Michael Trigilio On June 12, 2021, the Washington Post reported a story out of Huntersville, North Carolina, about a planned event at a former human-trafficking and torture