We Are the Mutants: The Book!
If you haven’t heard, we wrote a book! And it’s out right now! Won’t you please buy it and be our best friend?
Shopping Mauled: Revisiting ‘The Mall: An Attempted Escape from Everyday Life’
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…
The Lonely, Horny Prophecies of Lynne Tillman’s ‘Weird Fucks’
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…
The Violence of Reason: ‘Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1985’
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.)
Between Mushroom Cloud and Monastery: Douglas Coupland’s ‘Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture’
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…
“Beyond Human Conjecture”: Charlton Comics’ ‘Creepy Things’
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…
“Left A Galaxy of Dreams Behind”: Joe Banks’ ‘Hawkwind: Days of the Underground’
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…
Big Tech, Nostalgia, and Control: Grafton Tanner’s ‘The Circle of the Snake’
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…
“A Peculiar State of Poise”: Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘The Lathe of Heaven’
Le Guin was always ambivalent about revolution, and especially about revolutionary violence…
Eaten Alive: James Herbert’s ‘Rats’ Trilogy
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.”
We Are the Mutants 