pave, occupy, populate
This post began as something I intended to finish writing in December 2024. In late 2024 I went to a bookstore in Berlin, and on a whim decided to buy Han Kang’s Human Acts. I had never before made an effort to read recent winners of the Nobel Prize, and I knew nothing about the [ ]
Osage County, Oklahoma in den 1920ern: Die Native Americans der Osage leben ein luxuriöses Leben. Sie haben mehr Autos pro Einwohner als irgendeine andere Bevölkerungsgruppe Amerikas, natürlich immer mit einem eigenen Fahrer, sie tragen allesamt unglaublich luxuriösen Schmuck – das Szenenbild von Jack Fisk zeigt sich, wie der Filmkritiker Nick Pinkerton es ausdrückt, als das [ ]
Abstract In this article I consider the ways in which Kim Stanley Robinson’s climate-change-focused The Ministry for the Future (2020) conceives of possible avenues for historical change. I begin by arguing that Robinson’s novel has to be read in the context of “conventional” utopian and ecological sf, which largely ignore or repress the question of [ ]
The planetary ecosystem is in crisis. Humans brought it there. What are we going to do about it? These are three enormous simplifications, the latter two of which in particular have produced endless disagreement: which humans produced the crisis? Which “we” can and should do something about it, and what specifically is “it?” But the [ ]
I have been trying for a while to find the right words to explain my basic problem with Marx(ism). My previous attempt was embedded in a larger discussion of Bruno Latour and Rita Felski* on the one hand and Marx and Stuart Hall on the other, something which I ended up shelving. I was reminded [ ]
Who invented Science Fiction? The New York Times recently advertised their review of an H. G. Wells biography on Twitter with the unfortunate sentence “With Jules Verne and the publisher Hugo Gernsback, H.G. Wells invented the genre of science fiction“. The majority of comments and quote-tweets angrily pointed out that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein (1818) [ ]
I have been considering for some time writing about “post-critique”, the promised new method (or “turn”, if you will) in the humanities that has sprung into being between about 2004 and 2015. I am thinking here most specifically of Bruno Latour and Rita Felski, though other figures precede and follow them; what unites them, more [ ]
I had planned to read (or at least skim) Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement for a while, since it keeps being referenced in passing in discussions of climate change and literature, but had not gotten around to reading it until recently. I regrettably did not even manage to read it in time for my review [ ]
Formerly troubled Nicolas Cage lives in some remote rural location with his formerly troubled wife, Mandy. Mandy is murdered. He takes bloody revenge. None of this matters, we are told, because we are seeing a Form Over Content movie.
Mainstream videogames have for the longest time, it would seem to me, been seen as a tool of escapism. The steady improvement of graphics may have mostly been in the service of verisimilitude, but the interactions between player and environment that videogames encourage are usually of the kind that are being denied to most people [ ]