Twin Peaks – His Dark Cosmology
I used to say: ‘watching David Lynch is like listening to jazz – it’s not meant to be a logically understood, it’s meant to be experienced.’ I was wrong.
Twin Peaks: the Return is as close a viewer will come …
The author’s lament: Why the fuck am I doing this?
It’s a question writers ask throughout their careers. While it is one, I suspect, most frequently posed (yelled, sighed) at the beginning, even the best have been known to lament. Richard Flanagan, for example, nearly quit writing to be a …
The Noir Standard – Baby Driver and The Heist Gone Wrong
A staple of noir cinema is the heist gone wrong. Perhaps the best known contemporary example is Reservoir Dogs (1992), in which Tarantino – steeped in and heavily influence by classic noir – depicts the aftermath of a diamond …
Logan, Suicide Squad, Wonder Woman: the Good, the Bad and the Perfectly Adequate
Suicide Squad
What a fucking mess. There were apparently two versions of Suicide Squad, the dark original and a funnier reshoot. It shows. This movie doesn’t know what the fuck it is doing.
A full run-down isn’t necessary; it’s been …
The Online Bubble (and how to escape)
The online bubble is making us dumber and meaner. It has become a sociopathic space curated by giant corporations, corruptive of clear thought and the capacity for human empathy.
I can’t quite remember when it happened. How we became so …
Recommendations: Three Video essays
Wouldn’t have a fucking clue how to do one myself – I may be a science fiction writer, but I’m also a technophobe with a generalised incompetence when it comes to matters of new media.
But, look, I do watch …
Writing Mid-Term Review 2017: Recognition and Rejection
Let’s start with the good news: an Aurealis Award and an ‘Best of the Year’ Anthology inclusion.
The Aurealis nomination for Best Horror short story was unexpected, because I’d never written horror before, and well, I’d never thought I’d …
Late Bloomer (the old fart as new writer)
I respond with a mixture of envy and fear every time a writer tells me they were born to write. Every time I read about this famous writer getting their first type-writer at 10, or that famous writer publishing their …
Ditmar Award Nominations – Double-Decker Chuffed
The shortlist for the Ditmar Awards has been released and I’m on it. Twice. Which means I’m double-decker chuffed, as my five year old son would say.
The Ditmars are voted on by the Australian spec fic community (where the …
The Post-Noir Literature of Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro writes in the aftermath of the noir event. The tragedy has passed, the noir moment of betrayal now an unreliable memory.
Ishiguro is my favourite living author. I re-read one of his novels recently: An Artist of the …