Well, more a set of guidelines than a manifesto. It wouldn’t be particularly punk to tell others how to think and how to be.
We should begin this story with the question: what is the ‘punk’ in cyberpunk? It’s an …
Want to understand the surveillance-state dystopia our world has descended into? Need a primer on our cyberpunk present? Desperate to know what comes after the plague?
Well friends, you’ve come to the right place. I doubt there are many humans …
Red Harvest, Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars: Remaking the Remake
The American Western was revitalised by an Italian director inspired by a Japanese filmmaker with a love of hardboiled fiction.
This is the strange international pedigree of the ground-breaking A …
I love this town.
The frenetic pace, the unapologetic culture, the dynamism of Hanoi. This is a city always 
on the move; horizontal, with scooters swarming through teaming streets; vertical, as mammoth yellow cranes raise buildings up from craters into …
My mind was not simply blown as I watched Mad Max: Fury Road. It was George Miller blown: multiple explosions, in an apocalyptic sandstorm, with lightning, then more explosions.
To say Miller has made a hyperkinetic masterpiece is to …
It’s the perfect storm for the struggling writer: average author income is collapsing, social mobility is in decline across nearly all wealthy countries, and inequality is on the rise. These structural changes are leading to an inescapable reality: it is …
Existentialist literature is the purest form of noir, but it isn’t the best.
Noir film and novels, according to various definitions, usually involve a morally ambiguous main character, a seedy underworld, femme fatale, corrupt system, bleak ending, and lots of …
Paul Verhoeven is one of the great misunderstood satirists of modern cinema.
His work is often dismissed as mindless ultra-violence. Though most critics understand that Robocop and Total Recall were, at their core, satires of corporate culture and greed, he’s …
It’s not true, of course. Authors such as Orwell, Ishiguro, and Camus were formative influences on me, as were many others.
However – and as you can probably tell from this website – if I were allowed to choose only …
“There are few things that are so unpardonably neglected in our country as poker. The upper class knows very little about it. Now and then you find ambassadors who have sort of a general knowledge of the game, but the …
