Karen Mirza and Brad Butler's 2012 film project Deep State, scripted by China Miéville, tells the story of a time traveller who passes through holes in conventional history created by the irruptive power of riots.
View More Deep State and the Future of Theatre
Iceland is, to put it weirdly, so hot right now. Iceland is circulating through the social imaginary in a number of big-budget cinematic vehicles: Dr. Mann’s uninhabitable planet in Interstellar…
View More With Love from Iceland
As part of Birkbeck’s Arts Week 2017, we organised a panel titled "Will 2017 be 1984" (you can listen to a podcast recording of the panel here) which considered the uncanny relevance of Orwell’s novel…
View More Will 2017 be 1984?
What do we mean by this odd subject, Speculative Fiction? If we’re dealing with extrapolative fictions, expressly concerned with imagining alternate futures, presents and pasts, when does now begin and end?…
View More Contemporary Speculative Fiction
Latin@futurism has yet to register within the hegemonic popular imagination—one historically drenched in whiteness and heteropatriarchy. At best, it is recognized as a quaint…
View More The Altermundos of Latin@futurism
Speculative fiction is a paradox. Synonymous with science fiction and “genre literature,” it is also one of the most ancient modes of storytelling in literary history. One could easily identify Plato’s Atlantis…
View More Jordan Krall’s Speculative Fiction
Martin MacInnes’ debut novel Infinite Ground (2016) is structured around a disarmingly simple premise. At the height of a heatwave in a South American country, a 29-year-old man named Carlos is having…
View More Martin MacInnes and Celtic SF
This article will suggest that Alan Moore’s perspective can usefully be considered as part of an underground aesthetic which declares the necessity of solidarity of experience with all other groups…
View More Speculative Resistance in Lost Girls
For the last several months I have been lucky enough to have been on writing sabbatical from my university. As such, I have often found myself around and about my hometown during the day. I feel like I am a strange figure, writing in coffee shops, making enemies of baristas, running errands, and looking, to all but the most enlightened of observers, decadently unemployed. In an effort to stave off the effects of my increasingly sedentary life…
View More Pod People: Brave New Worlds of Digital Audio Drama
To read a Tom McCarthy novel is to find oneself weirdly and wildly awash in grids within grids, maps within maps, of infrastructural objects and systems. Protagonists and minor characters alike obsess over these objects and systems of infrastructure—over their grandeur, their minutiae, their flows and flaws, slows and jams, their symbolic ideological concretizations, their masterful and/or absurd designs, their volumes of strata.
View More Infrastructure and the Anthropocene in Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island