dystopia
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Shortly after The Life of Chuck, another Stephen King adaptation has now hit the cinemas, but at just the right time. Although King’s novel The Long Walk was published back in 1979, at a time when the Vietnam War was still raging, its theme has become relevant to European audiences once again. Director Francis Lawrence
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What responsibility does future knowledge entail? And isn’t knowing the future already a contradiction in terms? Steven Spielberg explores these questions in his film adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s short story Minority Report (1956). And comes to a very intuitive – perhaps too intuitive – conclusion. In my review of Terry Gilliam’s 12 monkeys, I
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→ to part 1 Is religion the root of all evil or the seed of a humanity that is growing beyond itself? In the sequel to The Parable of the Sower, Octavia Estelle Butler takes the time to realise what previously existed only in the thoughts of protagonist Lauren Olamina: Earthseed. The first volume was
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If there’s one thing that futuristic novels don’t do, it’s predict the future. Where computerised modulations reach their limits due to the sheer amount of available or unavailable data, a single genius mind is supposed to lift the veil of the future. Admittedly, Octavia Estelle Butler, alarmed by the political climate of the 1990s, has
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Ratings generally have a very limited informative value, as the very attempt to translate the quality of a film into a quantitative scale entails an enormous reduction in complexity. The Zero Thereom, Terry Gilliam’s crowning finale of his Orwellian triptych, has not received the best ratings on internet rating platforms, but is more relevant than
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At last someone has got it right: the ‘Dark Middle Ages’ never existed, they are still in the future. What serves us in the present as a projection screen for our modern fears and desires – an age of filth, violence, stupidity and barbarism – is relocated to a planet outside the solar system in
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In a totalitarian society, laughter is sometimes a liberating, even rebellious act. If the satirical exaggeration made the depressing setting of Terry Gilliam’s first dystopia Brazil bearable, 12 monkeys, the second film in the so-called Orwellian triptych, is surprisingly humourless for a director who grew up in the Monty Python comedy troupe. This may be
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A jellyfish drifts in the ocean. This is how Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Lathe of Heaven begins, but anyone looking forward to post-humanist jellyfish science fiction will be disappointed after one page, because the jellyfish is just a metaphor for the fragile yet powerful subconscious in the sea of dreams. Portland in the
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Someone must have slandered Mr. Buttle, for one day, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. The story could be told from the perspective of the innocent family man who, due to a printing error, is mistaken for a terrorist named Tuttle, captured, tortured and killed. A bureaucratic error for which the inconspicuous
Dennis Biba 