Reading a novel is kind of a strange experience: there are voices in your head telling you a story, often pretending you’re there in the room with them—or, even stranger, pretending that you are inside their minds. Books in the form of a diary are much less strange to contemplate: it’s perfectly reasonable to imagine you’ve picked […]
It’s on-trend for 2017: drawing comparisons between the fictional dystopias we read and the geopolitical situation around us—no sooner does an election tip one way or the other, and someone generates a thinkpiece making comparisons to Orwell and Philip K. Dick. But while many of imagined dystopias come close to the one we all experience every day, […]
Cyberpunk has a reputation for neon-tinged humorlessness, but Exploded View, a New Wave Cyberpunk thriller from hardcore musician-cum-journalist-cum-author Sam McPheeters, is at once grim and gritty, and ruthlessly funny. It’s a dark procedural set in a near future in which an overtaxed bureaucracy, an overpopulated city teeming with a massive underclass of refugees, and a generally apathetic public have coalesced into a crime-ridden […]