Cyberpunk is now.
The iconic opening of Blade Runner (1982) is stamped with the date November 2019. This has inspired several mainstream publications to ask: what did Blade Runner get right about the future?
As we’ll see, these articles …
This isn’t a ‘Thanos is right’ article. There were a proliferation of these hot takes in the aftermath of Endgame a few months back*, and I doubt I could add much. Rather, this article is about the consequences of halving …
Tribalism goes to the core of who we are as human beings, and what we need to feel human. Yet modern society, by design, is anti-tribal. As Sebastian Junger argues in his excellent book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging: …
Electric, terrifying, charismatic, complex. Roy Batty was everything a cyberpunk antagonist should be: morally ambiguous, ultra-violent, flawed, philosophical. And if there’s a difference between cyberpunk protagonist and antagonist, well, those differences are too small to contemplate here. 
Roy Batty embodied …
The premise of John Wyndham’s 1957 science fiction novel, The Midwich Cuckoos, is this: a species of parasitic aliens infect all the women of Midwich, Winshine. The women become pregnant, simultaneously, and give birth to children who seem normal in …
I recently watched Star Wars with my son. He’s seven; this was his first time. I’m a touch older, I’ve probably watched it 30 times, though the last was more than a decade ago.
Rather than talk about the experience …
You will know the name Thomas Piketty via his seminal book on inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Like Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, Piketty’s was a best-selling work read by almost no-one.
Here’s the gist. …
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
Kurt Vonnegut
In 1977 JG Ballard prophesied:
Every home will be transformed into its own TV studio. We’ll all be simultaneously actor, …
I’m a long-time fan of Kim Stanley Robinson. I believe his relentless focus on climate change, and the quality of the story-telling that goes along with it, has made his books not only worthy, but important. His work serves …
Somewhere in the fugue induced by the final stages of my doctorate – there’ve been times I’ve not been sure of the day or month I’m in – I acquired a new literary agent. And a damned good one, at …
