The 1983 film WarGames, directed by John Badham and written by Walter Parkes and Lawrence Lasker, was a box office smash and eventually became a generational touchstone, offering mainstream audiences their first glimpse at the computer technology that would ineluctably become part of their lives in the next decade and beyond…
By Brother Bill
A wave of dark, violent horror films arrived in the early-to-mid 2000s, all set in the present-day real world and centered on people caught up in deranged systems or subcultures. It seemed as though the lone psycho supermen of earlier decades (Hannibal Lecter, Max Cady, endlessly respawning Freddies, Michaels, and Jasons) were being supplanted…
“Brace yourself for an exciting, realistic sight and sound journey into another world…” Such was the promise emblazoned on the star-spangled blue packaging of the AudiSee titles, a series of “stereo dramatizations,” science-fiction audiobooks on cassette, each accompanied by a glossy, full-color illustrated booklet…
By K.E. Roberts
Along with Bigfoot, UFOs, and all manner of “mysteries of the unknown,” the Bermuda Triangle permeated the weird wilderness of 1970s pop culture. While primed by a cult following dating to the mid-1960s that was heavily influenced by the writings of paranormal researcher Charles Fort, the myth can be traced all the way back to Plato’s description of a lost land called Atlantis…
By J.G. Newman
I typically don’t role-play when I play games. Which isn’t to say I don’t invest deeply in whatever game I’m playing; my emotional connection to my avatar is just fueled more by traditional audience-to-character empathy than actually inhabiting the role of whatever druid or space marine whose shoes the game places me in…
In Lesson Two, we finished drawing Space Assault’s playfield, complete with our seven Vegetation Processing Plants that we must protect with the Fission Gun Tower. The planet Kala is strangely quiet, which can only mean the Clovis aliens are ready to attack—as soon as we learn how to get them on the screen!
In the early 1980s, the spectrum of opinions regarding life after a nuclear exchange ranged from that held by the scientific establishment—at best a severely compromised environment, and at worst the extinction of the human race—to another, less pessimistic view that sensed an opportunity for a mankind neutered by the shackles of modern society to return to the more unambiguous, manly, uncompromised moral certainties of a simpler age…
American society collectively shuddered in November 1978 as news of the Jonestown cult mass death began to filter home from Guyana. Jim Jones, head of the Peoples Temple, commanded the death of over 900 of his followers, as well as the murder of a U.S. Congressman, four journalists, and a defecting Temple member, in a spasm of cult violence never seen before in the modern age…
By K.E. Roberts
Early in Penelope Spheeris’ 1981 documentary on the Los Angeles punk scene, she asks Eugene, a 14-year-old skinhead who talks like a Valley kid, what he likes about punk. “It’s like, it’s not bullshit,” he responds. “There’s no rock stars now, you know?” It’s to the director’s credit that the next hour and a half, elapsing with the speed and eloquence of an autobahn car crash, both proves and refutes that answer…
It would be nice to say that Les Edwards needs no introduction, but it might be more accurate to say that he should need no introduction. Despite the vast influence his work has exerted upon science fiction, horror, and fantasy illustration over the last forty-odd years, he remains perhaps less well-known than he deserves outside the battlements of genre art…
We Are the Mutants 