“Alien 0 or Alien 5?”
Continuity’s at risk in the new Alien prequel. Faced with “the space jockey,” xenomorph eggs in the cargo hold and what the corporation knew and when they knew it, Martin Anderson foresees “some nasty acts of canon-hacking.”
REPLICANT LIKE ME
The idea for this article occurred to me a few seconds into “Life is a Gamble,” track 10 on Marvin Gaye’s score for Ivan Dixon’s Trouble Man. The churning sax and bubbles of Moog rolled over me, and suddenly I was in Los Angeles, circa 2019. I pulled […]
All People Are Sheep… Except You, Dear Reader
Flatter your reader. That sounds like a pretty solid narrative strategy! Make your audience think they are really smart, and they’ll probably come back for more. Books can do this automatically, just by the virtue of taking us into the thoughts of other people – not so easy […]
The Trouble with Endings
I’ve noticed recently that otherwise good stories have been let down by their endings. It’s partly due to the expectations of the audience: you can imagine any kind of ending you want, but when the ending finally arrives, it’s been narrowed down to a single one of those […]
The Cultural Gutter 