Dylan Horrocks writes: “New artforms bring new aesthetic paradigms. Those who fail to recognise this tend to miss the point of the work altogether, dismissing it as frivolous, bad or even dangerous.” A long article about comics, videogames, and fantasy novels.
Bloody Culture
With his new book Ilium, Dan Simmons has written an exciting work of science fiction that is partly based on Homer’s Iliad. At first it would seem that Simmons is writing Ilium in the shadow of the Iliad — a dry and dull piece of literature, right? — […]
No Love For the Glove
The line between gimmick and innovation is sometimes hard to draw. Game purists look down on specialized peripherals, and while I like my shotguns and dance-pads in single-purpose arcade games, I rarely think they’re justified in a multi-purpose home system. Maybe I know too many people who bought […]
The Mumpimus writes about Stories of Sex and Identity: “Despite a fairly conservative base of readers, SF has been investigating sex and gender since at least the time of Theodore Sturgeon, and a few recent stories which fit into this tradition have caught my attention.”
Stella Performance
Leiji Matsumoto’s Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5y5tem is a near-feature-length animated silent film with a musical score that almost exactly corresponds to Discovery, an album by French band Daft Punk. This is obviously by intention; Daft Punk have a history of great, weird videos, […]
Going Public with our Joysticks
One of the biggest contributors to videogaming’s nerd factor is that it’s most often a solitary act. The bepimpled teenager channelling his angst through a controller in the darkness of his parent’s basement is a cliché with more than a few grains of truth. But it hasn’t always […]
The Cultural Gutter 