In 1984, I knew with absolute certainty that my life was about to change. The arrival of a paradigm shift had been announced to me through the pages of Your Computer magazine, and the tawdry provincial realities around me were soon to disperse like fag smoke on the breeze, making way for an exciting new existence whose structure would be hewn out of glowing, chirping digital matter…
I first encountered Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book series in 1985. I’d caught glimpses of the tatty-yet-much-loved BBC television series from 1981 on my local PBS station, and that sent me to the bookstore to find out what the heck this British science fiction comedy was all about. Over the summer of 1985 I tore through the paperback versions of the first three volumes in the series…
This album full of spiritually-minded pop-funk was the product of a pair of teenage artists—vocalist/drummer Chris McDaniels (then 16 years of age) and elder brother, guitarist, producer, and arranger London McDaniels (all of 17 in 1978). The brothers had grown up in Southern California among the music business…
Japanese ambient music grew out of the 1980s “economic miracle” that saw the country undergo massive urban development and industrial expansion, with Tokyo emerging as a global financial and cultural mecca. Hiroshi Yoshimura, a sound designer by trade and a musician since age five, was the defining figure of a close-kept movement he and fellow pioneer Satoshi Ashikawa called “environmental music”…
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…
Fate magazine, born in 1948 at the outset of both the Cold War and the flying saucer era, was a digest-sized periodical dedicated to the exploration of the paranormal. Fate leapt from the fecund imagination of Ray Palmer, the editor of Amazing Stories magazine for most of the 1940s…
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…
Assassin, spy, organizer of literary journals: Yakov Grigorievich Blumkin could only have been created by the Russian Revolution. An early member of the Cheka, or secret police, Blumkin spent his short life engaging in political conspiracies and travelling the globe…
We Are the Mutants 