On finishing Susannah Wise’s standalone post-apocalyptic debut The Fragile Earth, some readers may have wondered where she would go next. It’s hard to imagine anyone predicting the antic, comedic, sometimes surreal ghost story with multiversal elements that is her follow up – Okay Then That’s Great. When the book opens, Marnie has once again seen…
It’s hard to talk about Cole Haddon’s dizzying and multifaceted debut Psalms for the End of the World without giving away at least a few spoilers. It is a narrative that ranges across time and reality in an attempt to explore what makes us human. If the narrative has a centre, it involves two disparate…
David Cronenberg’s first feature film in eight years sees the master of smart but visceral horror back in the groove. Crimes of the Future (2022*) is a gripping but gruesome exploration of how technology and the human body intersect. As such, this film can be considered the long-delayed (Cronenberg wrote it in 1999 but shelved…
Jordan Peele, the creative force behind Get Out! and Us, returns with his third feature film as director, Nope. This is one out of the box – a film that’s oddly both more conventional and more daring than his other work. And at a time when the box office is dominated by sequels and re-boots,…
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia seems determined to write a book in every sub-genre of science fiction, fantasy and horror. She has taken on vampires in Certain Dark Things, powers in The Beautiful Ones and the gothic tradition in Mexican Gothic. Now Moreno-Garcia takes on and reinvents The Island of Doctor Moreau, one of the slightly less famous…
In 2018, singer and actor Janelle Monáe released a concept album called Dirty Computer. Its release was accompanied by a 45 minute long narrative film starring Monáe and Tessa Thompson. The film explained that people were called computers and the “dirty” computers were people who had run foul of the system, people who were different,…
With a life span approaching that of many a dinosaur (30 years), the Jurassic saga comes to an end with Jurassic World Dominion. And as T. S. Eliot presaged, this fictional world ends not with a bang but a whimper. The franchise – having received a shot in the arm with Jurassic World in 2015…
Emily St John Mandel came to prominence with her fourth book, the pandemic post-apocalypse Station Eleven. That book gained a second wind when the COVID pandemic hit, and was turned into an HBO series. Some of the craziness of that success, and of the pandemic itself, is captured in St John Mandel’s latest book Sea…
A. Lee Martinez specialises in a kind of fantasy comedy that riffs on a range of fantasy, science fiction literary and movie tropes. His 2013 novel Emperor Mollusk Versus The Sinister Brain centred around a super villain, and the book before that 2012’s Chasing the Moon was a comic hero’s journey fighting a range of…
Multiverses are all the rage right now. From Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse to the upcoming Dr Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, it seems like you can’t turn around without another multi-dimensional movie smacking you in the face. But Everything Everywhere All At Once is different. Yes, it’s another multiverse, but one the good folks…
