Chris Mitchell Throughout 1997, the Russian space station Mir made international headlines as it lurched from one near disaster to another. Populated by Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts, Mir became a symbol of the two countries’ collaboration in the post-Soviet age. But even with the financing and expertise of NASA injected into the ailing Russian […]
Ulf Poschardt: DJ Culture
Chris Mitchell In the last 30 years, the role of the DJ has transformed from being a mere purveyor of pop music to being the creator of pop music. This transformation is due almost solely to the humble analogue technology of the record turntable, which still thrives in the midst of this supposedly digital decade. […]
Julian Dibbell: My Tiny Life
Chris Mitchell With the popularity of the World Wide Web these days, it’s easy to forget that the Internet has other tricks up its telephone wires. MUDs (Multi User Dimension) and MOOs (Multi user dimension, Object Orientated) are burgeoning virtual reality communities tucked away in the backwaters of cyberspace. My Tiny Life is Village Voice […]
Julian Dibbell: My Tiny Life
Chris Mitchell With the popularity of the World Wide Web these days, it’s easy to forget that the Internet has other tricks up its telephone wires. MUDs (Multi User Dimension) and MOOs (Multi user dimension, Object Orientated) are burgeoning virtual reality communities tucked away in the backwaters of cyberspace. My Tiny Life is Village Voice […]
Iain Banks: A Song Of Stone
David B. Livingstone Anybody would be forgiven a measure of confusion upon entry into one of Iain Banks’ many fictional worlds. From the moldering attic at the epicenter of The Wasp Factory to the immense, hallucinatory title structure of The Bridge, Banks has always delighted in plunging his readers into strange, painstakingly described settings and […]
Don DeLillo: Underworld
Gary Marshall Starting with a 1951 baseball game and ending with the Internet, “Underworld” is not a book for the faint-hearted. Elegiac in tone and described variously as DeLillo’s Magnum Opus and his attempt to write the Great American Novel, the book weighs in at a hefty 827 pages and zips back and forwards in […]
P.J. O’Rourke: Eat The Rich
Gary Marshall P.J. O’Rourke has never been afraid to tackle big subjects. Previous books have attempted to explain the entire US Government, refute the arguments of the environmental lobby, and describe the bits of the Gulf War that CNN wouldn’t broadcast. With his latest book, “Eat The Rich”, PJ sets his sights on possibly the […]
Richard Powers: Gain
David B. Livingstone Nobody talks much about the quest for “great American novel” anymore; the phrase, once a sneering European attempt at an oxymoron, was long ago answered by Faulkner, Hemingway, and Miller. To the surprise of some, even America – first, the motley amalgam of immigrant trappers and farmers; later, the citadel of capitalism […]
Douglas Coupland: Lara’s Book Lara Croft And The Tomb Raider Phenomenon
Chris Mitchell Well, it had to happen. Lara Croft, star of the Tomb Raider videogames, gets the coffee table treatment in her own glossy picture book. In an attempt to give this tome some literary gravitas, “Generation X” author Douglas Coupland has been drafted in to provides thoughts about the Lara phenomenon and a story […]
Kimberly S. Young: Caught In The Net
Chris Mitchell Dr Kimberly Young has made something of a name for herself in the last few years with her research into the phenomenon of Internet addiction. Having set up the Centre for On-line Addiction and written numerous papers about Internet addicts over the last three years, Caught In The Net is a distilled account […]
Scott Adams: Dilbert Seven Years Of Highly Defective People
Chris Mitchell Dilbert is rapidly becoming enough of a cartoon icon to rival the fame of Disney’s most enduring creations. Chronicling the trials of a hapless IT engineer battling against the absurdities of corporate life, the Dilbert comic strip appears in over 1500 newspapers worldwide. Seven Years Of Highly Defective People is creator Scott Adams’ […]
Will Self: Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys
Robert Clarke In his new collection of short stories, Will Self once more welcomes us to the terrifyingly trenchant world of the literary recusant. With his usual irreverent wit and unrestrained surrealism, Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys sees Self move from the ridiculous to the downright absurd through a mixture of high art […]
Jim Crace: Quarantine
David B. Livingstone For some strange reason, the story of Christ – and the stories of messiahs in general – remain a source of irresistable fascination to a certain breed of author, seemingly inviting compulsive retelling and reinterpretation, despite both the difficulty of the subject matter and almost-certain censure by the devout (see Salman Rushdie). […]
John L. Casti: The Cambridge Quintet
Chris Mitchell When world chess champion Garry Kasparov was defeated by IBM’s Deep Blue II last year, it provoked a renewed popular interest in the possibilities of artificial intelligence. Kasparov commented that he felt he was playing “an alien intelligence”. But was Deep Blue really thinking or simply number-crunching at a incredible speed to produce […]
Geoff Ryman: 253
Chris Mitchell Despite appearing in print for the first time this month, Geoff Ryman’s 253 is not a new book. This self-styled “interactive novel” has been available on the Internet since 1996 at http://www.ryman-novel.com, and its electronic success has prompted the “print re-mix” version to be published. The original Internet version of 253 was not […]
Joey Anuff, Ana Marie Cox: Suck: Worst Case Scenarios In Media, Culture, Advertising and The Internet
Chris Mitchell Suck has long been the sardonic scourge of the internet. Under the slogan “a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun”, the Suck website serves up a free daily dose of mordant satire, analysis and “buzzsaw journalism” about the most recent media occurrences. It’s a recipe which has made Suck popular across the […]
Mark Slouka: War Of The Worlds: The Assault On Reality
Chris Mitchell If Mark Slouka is to be believed, we are losing our grip on reality. With the proliferation of technologies that allow us to immerse ourselves in artificially created worlds – from radio and television through to virtual reality and cyberspace – the line between real reality and artificial reality is blurring. Soon, Slouka […]
David Lavery: Deny All Knowledge: Reading The X-Files
Chris Mitchell Just what is it that makes The X-Files so popular? The television show which revolves around the investigations of FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully into all things paranormal has become incredibly popular, narrating their quest for the ever-elusive truth through a combination of police drama, gothic horror and science fiction. Deny […]
Nicholas Blincoe: Jello Salad: John L. Williams: Faithless
Jason Weaver sees two very different sides of London in Nicholas Blincoe’s Jello Salad and John L. Williams’ Faithless What is there to say about Jello Salad by Nicholas Blincoe? Well, there’s a bit of sex, and a lot of drugs and even more violence. Blincoe’s characters do things to the body that will never […]
Timothy Leary: Design For Dying
Chris Mitchell Even in death, Timothy Leary is still trying to shatter society’s taboos. Design For Dying appears eighteen months after the former Harvard psychologist turned LSD guru passed away from prostate cancer. Written during his last months, Leary’s book attempts to dispel our fear of death by suggesting that technology increasingly lets us orchestrate […]
Jeff Noon: Nymphomation
Chris Mitchell After giving Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland electric shock treatment last year in Automated Alice, Jeff Noon’s new novel Nymphomation returns to the near-future Manchester of his first two books, Vurt and Pollen. While Automated Alice was an audacious exercise in seeing quite how far he could push reinventing a classic, Nymphomation sees […]
Tibor Fischer: The Collector Collector
David B. Livingstone here are going to be people who’ll complain that this book and its author are just a little bit too clever for their own good. In The Collector Collector, Tibor Fischer strains suspension of disbelief to within millimeters of its snapping point, thanks to a presumptuous – and on the surface, unpromising […]
Thomas Pynchon: Mason And Dixon
David Livingstone Brevity, the aphorism has it, is the soul of wit. So where does that leave Thomas Pynchon, whose current offering Mason & Dixon weighs in at close to eight hundred pages – and of often-impenetrable stylized “old english” text, no less? The real Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, America’s original sub-dividers, took upon […]
Gary Indiana: Resentment
David B. Livingstone Historically, the turn of centuries and millenniums have marked periods of heightened popular anxiety, social unrest, collective madness, and religious mania. From the vantage point of 1997, a little less than two and a half years from two-thousand-zero-zero, our own age seems little different: Heaven’s Gaters are hopping aboard Hale-Bopp, militia types […]
Liz Evans: Girls Will Be Boys: Women Report On Rock
Jason Weaver Now, here’s a conundrum. Liz Evans has edited a volume of journalism on contemporary rock music written exclusively by women and here am I, a man, sent out to review it. Ideologically thin ice. I have to confess, I’m tripping over every nuance. A wrong-footed phrase is going to sound like an alibi, […]
