Technology
A Brief Overview of ESCAPE CODE for VR; ‘We are here to help’
A fan of awesome mid-80’s/90’s science fiction? Techy-savvy enough to own a VR headset (cheap cardboard’s fine if that’s your thing!)? If so, jack into the net and follow me through the ephemeral wiri...
‘Scoring isn’t killing Mr Frankenstein, it’s a part of the race’: A Review of Death Race 2000
Though the late seventies is famously known for producing Star Wars IV: A New Hope, earlier SF films in the decade were often dark, grisly and grim stories that were partly inspired by the current pol...
‘I can buy you, grow you, sell you, cut you into bits. Your screams: my music’; A Review of Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix
Though published in the mid-nineties, Sterling’s compendium Schismatrix Plus includes the Schismatrix novel itself, along with several shorts and prose pieces that add to his Shaper/Mechanist universe...
What does Italian Futurism have to do with Cyberpunk?
Think about an artistic movement that praised the machine, technology, and speculated about the future: that saw in those the beginning of a new era, so to speak, the aesthetics of which would be colo...
A Brief Overview of Hypnospace Outlaw for PC/MAC/LINUX; ‘Bedtime just got a whole lot HYPPER!’
The year is sometime in the 1980’s, possibly mid fantasised 1990’s. The world remains pixelated, and you, my friend, are the newest Hypno Enforcer. Developed by Jay Tholen, creator of the acclaimed po...
The Automaton Sequence: 5.0: ‘It’s in your nature to destroy yourselves’; The Human as Machine
‘We are all chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.’ Donna Haraway, pp. 158 As the Automaton Sequence comes to an end, I wish to end on a bang; to...
The Automaton Sequence: 3.0: ‘You are my creator, but I am your master’; Robot Anxiety
And so here we are, the dreaded Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus week. For the purpose of this article, I am referring to Mary Shelley’s opus, and to a lesser extent Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shell...
The Automaton Sequence: 1.0: What is a robot?
To ask the question, what is a robot, may, to some people, indeed sound overly simplistic, or even pointless. We all know what a robot is; it is a mechanical tool used to alleviate the human from bana...
On Sprawls and Metropolis
The term sprawl is more commonly associated with Gibson’s Sprawl series, and his imaginings of a highly technological cityscape that swathes the populous, still hyper-Orientalised; a mixing pot of a m...