From a review essay on Margaret Atwood’s new novel MaddAddam, which completes her apocalyptic-dystopian trilogy that began in 2003 with Oryx and Crake: You can take your pick of Cassandras: Michael Crichton, Mary Shelley, whoever made Gattaca. Literature and pop culture never stop obsessing about the bastard spawn of technology and biology, although movies love…
Tag: Science Fiction
Dystopia now: We’re living in (and living out) a real-life “Harrison Bergeron” scenario
Rebecca Solnit, writing in London Review of Books: In or around June 1995 human character changed again. Or rather, it began to undergo a metamorphosis that is still not complete, but is profound — and troubling, not least because it is hardly noted. When I think about, say, 1995, or whenever the last moment was…
Teeming Links – September 3, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net To preface today’s offering of recommended and necessary reading, here are passages from a hypnotic meditation on solitude, inner silence, reading, and the literary vocation by Rebecca Solnit, excerpted from her new book The Faraway Nearby: Like many others who turned into writers, I disappeared into books when…
Last of the Titans: A Note on the Passing of Ray Harryhausen (and Forrest Ackerman and Ray Bradbury)
EDITOR’S NOTE: With this post we welcome award-winning writer, editor, filmmaker, composer, and artist Jason V. Brock to the Teem. Jason’s work has been published in Butcher Knives & Body Counts, Simulacrum and Other Possible Realities, Fungi, Fangoria, S. T. Joshi’s Black Wings series, and elsewhere. He was Art Director/Managing Editor for Dark Discoveries magazine…
Short Film: ‘The Final Moments of Karl Brant’ – Dystopian SF starring Paul Reubens
In a word: wow. This new short film, released on July 30 and currently receiving enthusiastic praise all over the place, is a beautifully realized piece of short-form dystopian science fiction. It tells the story of a near future in which, to quote the official press release, “a neurologist and two homicide detectives use experimental…
Validating Ray Bradbury: Climate change and high temps linked to violent behavior
Remember Ray Bradbury’s famous fascination with the idea that hot weather spurs an increase in assaults and other violent behavior? This was the basic premise behind his widely reprinted 1954 short story “Touched with Fire,” in which two retired insurance salesmen try to prevent a murder. In a key passage, one of them shares his…
Teeming Links – August 2, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net I invite you to peruse today’s offering of necessary and recommended reading under the overarching emotional/conceptual rubric of this recent rumination about the extreme value of ambivalence and undecidedness amid our present sociocultural circumstance of frenetic and manipulative opinion-peddling and belief-mongering: We live in a society in which…
Short film ‘The Flying Man’: A dark and faintly Fortean take on superheroes
Over at The Daily Grail, Greg describes this fascinating and very slick short film as a “fun little superhero story with a Fortean feel to it.” io9’s Observation Deck calls the title character “the creepiest superhero” and concurs about the film’s quasi-Fortean dimension. Both point out that it recalls Mexico’s rash of flying humanoid sightings…
Jack Parsons: Occultist, sci-fi muse, US space program pioneer
My documentary “essay” on legendary/notorious space program pioneer and Crowleyan occultist Jack Parsons, composed of carefully chosen quotes and extracts from other writings, is now the featured piece at The Daily Grail: “The Tragic Tale of the Rocket Maker“ Many thanks go out to The Daily Grail’s mastermind, Greg Taylor, for expressing an interest in this…
Recommmended Reading 42
THIS WEEK: A report on the riots in Sweden and what they may portend for affluent liberal-democratic nations that have thought themselves insulated from such crises. Thoughts on how the Internet is using us all. The crumbling facade of mainstream authority and received wisdom in public health pronouncements, along with internal strife in the medical…