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pop culture collision
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pop culture collision
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Bio-Art Is Not A Crime, Movie Director Tells io9
Art professor Steve Kurtz's wife, Hope, died in her sleep in May 2004. When Kurtz called 911, however, the police saw petri dishes and a mobile DNA-extraction machine and called in the feds. Kurtz tried to explain that the high-school-level lab equipment was part of an art project he and Hope had been doing about genetically modified foods, but the FBI decided he was a bioterrorist. This case still continues nearly four years later, and a new direct-to-DVD movie, Strange Culture, uses Tilda Swinton, Thomas Jay Ryan and other actors to unravel one of the scariest cases of science fiction dictating legal actions in recent history. We talked to the director, Lynn Hershman Leeson. More »
Futuristic Fanzines From Our Embarrassing Past
Beware of The Blog, popular weblog accompaniment to "independent freeform radio station" WFMU, has put together a rather stunning gallery of covers of sci-fi fanzines from shows gone by. Go and look not only for the nostalgia of shows like Logan's Run and Quantum Leap, but also to celebrate the dedication of the brave souls who spent too much time xeroxing and stapling pages in those distant pre-internet days. [Beware of the Blog]
Beware of The Blog, popular weblog accompaniment to "independent freeform radio station" WFMU, has put together a rather stunning gallery of covers of sci-fi fanzines from shows gone by. Go and look not only for the nostalgia of shows like Logan's Run and Quantum Leap, but also to celebrate the dedication of the brave souls who spent too much time xeroxing and stapling pages in those distant pre-internet days. [Beware of the Blog] 
star wars culture wars
Japanese Star Wars Gorier, Longer, More Awesome
The official Star Wars blog says the Japanese manga adaptation of the first three Star Wars movies is light years better than Marvel Comics' original adaptation. To hammer home how flawed the American version was, here are some comparisons of how certain scenes appeared in the U.S. and japanese versions. More »
matter review
Iain M. Banks' New Novel Kicks Ass on a Galactic Scale
Iain M. Banks is the master of narrative zoom and pan: one minute he'll bring you in very close to a tiny moment in one person's life as she mourns the death of a brother, and the next you'll be spinning in deep space staring at a supermassive artificial world created by liquid-breathing aliens, millions of miles long, made of enormous braided tubes. Which of these minutes matters more? In Banks' new novel Matter, both do — and both are also tragicomically inconsequential. What always pleases about Banks' science fiction novels, many of which are set against the backdrop of a pan-galactic, A.I.-centric, socialist-libertarian society called The Culture, is that Banks always delivers substance and spectacle. You'll get the ethical questions, the sorrowful depictions of war, and the meditations on social evolution. But you'll also get world-shattering explosions, weird-ass aliens, and ancient technologies that are purely there to be fucking cool. More »
iain m. banks
Welcome to the Culture, the Galactic Civilization That Iain M. Banks Built
To celebrate the release of Iain M. Banks' novel Matter, we've put together this handy primer for you on the Culture, the pan-galactic civilization whose members and ex-members are the subjects of so many Banks novels, including Matter. Not only do we have a rundown of every single Culture novel, but we've also got some important excerpts from an obscure essay Banks wrote in 1994 about the ideas behind the Culture universe. Get ready to enter a world where ships are sentient, humans live for half a millennium, and living on a planet is probably the most backward thing you can do. More »
must read
Iain M. Banks' Unsung Culture Novel "Inversions"
With Iain M. Banks' new Culture novel, Matter, coming out in February, it's a good time to revisit one of his lesser-known Culture novels, Inversions. One of the reasons why this book may not be as instantly-recognizable in the Culture pantheon as his space operas Consider Phlebas and Look to Windward is that it's not set in outer space. In fact, it's set entirely on a semi-Medieval planet where a Culture agent has been sent to study the natives — and has gone native herself. More »
iain m. banks
