By now, dead shopping malls are as much a part of the popular imagination as they are blighted fixtures of suburban landscapes: sprawling vestiges of a bygone era when droves of consumers flocked to self-contained hubs of retail commerce…
By Sam Moore
What’s prescient about Weird Fucks is how everything both is and isn’t a matter of life and death; violence is an undercurrent, and every breakup may or may not be the end of the world…
By Eve Tushnet
Dangerous Visions is the third in a series, edited by Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyre, exploring the radical elements in pulp and genre publishing of the Cold War era. (We Are the Mutants has reviewed the first volume, on postwar youth culture, and the second, on revolution and the 1960s counterculture.)
By Eve Tushnet
I came to Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, thirty years after its 1991 publication date, expecting sharp sociocultural observation and maybe some economic critique…
Today’s sophisticated communications infrastructure did not emerge fully formed as totalitarian surveillance. Its annihilation of privacy was merely the price we had to pay for an unprecedented level of reliability within an endless array of applications…
I don’t really remember anybody actually mentioning Hawkwind in my youth. You just seemed to absorb an awareness of them from the landscape by osmosis, the same way you absorbed knowledge of the locations of short-cuts, haunted houses, and the more dangerous potholes…
I’m sure many members of Generation X have taken a moment to look around the pop culture landscape over the past decade and a half and had a sudden moment of realization: there are certainly a whole lot of people trying to sell me things using the media of my youth…
Le Guin was always ambivalent about revolution, and especially about revolutionary violence…
By M.L. Schepps
When 30-year-old ad-man James Herbert set out to write a novel, he had a simple goal in mind: “to show you what it was really like to have your leg chewed by a mutant creature.”
Using as its inspiration English Heritage, who preserve the very bones and sinews of English feudal hierarchy in the form of the nation’s stately homes and historical sites, Sharp’s English Heretic project seeks to détourne these edifices of authority…
We Are the Mutants 