The grumpy cat meme is getting a movie. Producers say it will be "Garfield-like." This horrific news should surprise nobody who follows Hollywood dealmaking. What might surprise you is how much this scenario resembles a dystopian scifi story called "The Waldo Moment," about how memes give rise to global fascism.

Last night marked the final episode in the second series of Black Mirror, the ultra-dark UK show that explores the future of media. This series, like the first, was a set of three short stories (we reviewed the first episode here), each set in the near future. Though this second series was more uneven than the first…

Robert Downey Jr. has bought the rights to "The Entire History of You," one of the episodes from the first season of Black Mirror. It's a pitch-dark tale of a future where people record their memories into brain implants, and can replay them for friends on their computers, mobiles, or whatever. The story centers on…

Last year, writer and satirist Charlie Brooker awed us and basically ripped our guts out with the first season of Black Mirror, a three-episode series of short stories set in troubling, media-saturated futures. Now he's back with season two, whose first episode, "Be Right Back," aired last night on Channel 4. It was a…

The intense creepiness of this trailer for season two of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror is only amped up by the fact that it resembles any number of ads for consumer electronics and internet whizbangery. By the time you get to the slogan — "The future is broken" — you're already feeling the horrible dystopian vibe.…

The first three episodes of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror were among the coolest television I've ever watched, and images and ideas from those three one-hour playlets often pop into my head at inopportune moments. So there's no way to overstate my excitement for the second batch of three episodes, coming sometime…

Black Mirror was one of the most ambitious, haunting pieces of television we've seen in years — so it's excellent news that we're apparently getting three more hours of it.

Aired late last year in the UK, the short anthology series Black Mirror is one of the best works of science fiction I've seen on television in a long time. All three episodes, set in near and distant futures, are about how we integrate new technologies into the most intimate parts of our lives, often with hideous…

How did Germany's dreams (and nightmares) of the future shift over a century or so, including two world wars and the Berlin Wall? A new anthology takes us inside the history of German science fiction.