I suppose I could go off on a rant here, as I usually do, about The Things We Have Lost, but I won’t. To quote the title of a Jacques Barzun book that I discovered (and subsequently bought) while browsing a bookstore, we get the culture we deserve…
Four years after the release of Raymond Briggs’ When the Wind Blows, children in the British Isles were treated to another misleadingly cheerful-looking jaunt through a postlapsarian landscape in Graham Oakley’s 1986 book Henry’s Quest. I’ve spoken elsewhere about the extent to which the British culture of the 1970s and ’80s seemed determined to inculcate feelings of dread and hopelessness in young people, but with its superficially light-hearted tone, Henry’s Quest took a different approach…
Veteran comics writer Larry Hama is best known for his work on Marvel’s G.I. Joe franchise, where he took what could have been a cynical toy line marketing tie-in and created a dynamic and hugely popular universe where salty commandos do battle with snake-themed terrorists in a neverending covert ouroboros of action…
In the almost-two decades between Blade Runner (1982) and The Matrix (1999), a particular form of cyberpunk existed across various medias. It was an era in which William Gibson and Bruce Sterling novels reigned supreme, Max Headroom was on the air in America, while the Bubblegum Crisis anime was being produced in Japan…
A little over two years ago, theorist and cultural critic Mark Fisher took his own life at the age of 48. I remember feeling numb at hearing the news; not out of sadness but more a sense of deja vu, of familiarity…
The 1980s saw the gradual ascendancy of cyberpunk narratives in popular science fiction. The genre projected Western societal trends seen in the decade—corporate conglomeration, the rise of computer networking and global media, and the ascendancy of Pacific Rim economies, most prominently Japan—into a vision of the future bursting with high technology controlled by a few neo-feudal corporate interests…
In 1970, Chile began a new experiment in society and economy with the democratic election of Salvador Allende, who would bring about a socialist Chile under his party Unidad Popular, a mixture of socialist, communist, and radical groups. In order to realize his platform, Allende and the UP enacted…
Broadcast television and nuclear fission: two technologies with their origins in the early 20th century study of particle physics, two technologies whose early development was situated in the years before the outbreak of World War II, and two technologies whose global prominence and predominance rose in the years immediately following the war…
In 1957, as the first artificial Earth satellite was launched into an elliptical orbit from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in present-day Kazakhstan, American science was suffering a crisis in self-image. No one in the Federal Government had predicted that the Soviets would claim the gold in the race to low Earth orbit…
High Times arrived on newsstands in 1974, initially intended to be a single-issue lark by founder Tom Forçade. But the magazine ended up becoming an underground institution, a harbinger of increasingly liberal points of view among the Baby Boomer generation on cannabis consumption and the increasing establishment of a domestic American hemp production market…
