Karin Kross Levenstein

When I talk about The Terror: Infamy, which concluded last Monday, the word that I keep using is frustrated. Frustrated because Infamy has two potentially great stories going on: a J-horror tale of intergenerational trauma, and a real-life suspense drama about being unjustly incarcerated by one’s own government, and neither of those stories is executed with […]

On August 29, 2019, Parks Canada released a stunning video of the interior of one of Sir John Franklin’s lost ships, HMS Terror. In the first detailed exploration since the wreck was rediscovered in 2016, archaeologists sent a remote drone to explore the wreck and found a stunningly well-preserved ship—“frozen in time” as the inevitable […]

“There is an art to smiling in a way that others will believe. It is always important to include the eyes; otherwise, people will know you hate them.” N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season

Quick: when someone says “science fiction and pop music”, who do you think of? These days, depending on your tastes and avidity for what’s new out there, it would not be entirely surprising if your mind jumped to Janelle Monáe. But a lot of people are going to immediately think of David Bowie—to whom Monáe […]

Welcome back to the Culture reread! Apologies for the gap in posting; things have not quite gone according to plan, but I’m back now to finish off Consider Phlebas, with this and one more post to follow shortly. After these last posts, I’ll be taking a few weeks off to get rolling on The Player […]

Welcome back to the Culture reread! This week, Horza and his crew continue their exploration of the Command System, where surprises and violence await. As we approach the conclusion of Consider Phlebas, the action ramps up, and Horza’s promises to…

Welcome back to the Culture Reread! This week, Horza and company arrive at Schar’s World, where of course nothing is going to go as hoped, and they descend into the tunnels below the surface in search of the Mind. We also return to Fal N’Geestra, who has gone up a mountain in search of enlightenment. […]

Welcome back to the Culture reread! Apologies for having missed last week; it turns out that traveling and reread posting are not necessarily fully compatible. But we’re back on track now, approximately halfway through Consider Phlebas. This week, we finally learn exactly what Damage is. Horza catches up with Kraiklyn and rejoins the crew of […]

Welcome back to the Culture reread! Today in chapters 5 and 6 of Consider Phlebas, Kraiklyn continues to prove himself an absolutely terrible captain, another heist goes dreadfully wrong, and Horza is captured by a cult. This entire sequence is one of the most revolting things I’ve read in almost any book anywhere. Don’t read […]

Welcome to the Culture Reread! Today in chapters 3 and 4 of Consider Phlebas, Horza gets some new friends—well, one, anyway—and in our first “State of Play” break, we drop in on the Culture for a look at the war from their side. As I write, I am…

Welcome to the Culture Reread! Today is the first proper post of the series, and we’re off with the prologue and chapters 1 and 2 of Consider Phlebas. Consider Phlebas, the first Culture novel that Banks completed and published, appeared in 1987. It takes place against the background of a long and destructive war between […]

The last time I had anything of length to say about the Culture novels of Iain M. Banks, I remarked with regard to Consider Phlebas, Player of Games, Use of Weapons, and the novella The State of the Art that “one of these four works is, in my opinion, Banks’s finest; which one and why […]

I was all set to finish a piece on the characters who inhabit the world of Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels, the advanced space-humans and artificial intelligences that drive the novels with their struggles and adventures. I’ve gotten distracted from that original plan, though. For one thing, a bad case of news poisoning has endowed the […]

Screenshot: Lava Bear Films I’m no veteran of film festivals—and indeed, I only started going to Austin’s Fantastic Fest last year. But if it ends up being the only film festival at which I’m a regular, I’m fine with that. It’s a “genre” festival, a…

Let’s face it: a lot of us are pretty weary of zombies by now. On those grounds it might be tempting to give The Girl With All the Gifts—one of a handful of YA genre novel adaptations screening at this year’s Fantastic Fest—a miss. (In fact my spouse told me afterward that if he’d known […]

Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children landed at Austin’s Fantastic Fest with an almighty splash. The Alamo Drafthouse has been gearing up for the release of this film with Septemburton, a celebration of Tim Burton’s work that includes special menu items, a Tim Burton issue of BirthMoviesDeath, and a slew of Burton programming. At the […]

Electronic eyes, hologram-producing implants, haptic tattoos—these are all examples of body modification that you’ll find throughout cyberpunk fiction. When you learn about artists Neil Harbisson and Moon Ribas and the modifications that they have…

Moogfest began as a one-day music festival celebrating both Robert Moog and electronic music in general. Over the last decade, it has grown into a multi-day symposium/festival with a scope that goes well beyond music and the circuit-driven gear that is used to make it. The daytime programming now includes discussions about transhumanism, cyborgs, race, […]

I was predisposed to like High-Rise, given my admiration for J.G. Ballard’s fiction and Ben Wheatley’s films. Wheatley is a Fantastic Fest favorite; his previous films Down Terrace, Kill List, Sightseers, and A Field in England all had their US premieres there in previous years, so it’s no surprise that High-Rise was one of the […]

If you use the words “horror” and “New England” together in a sentence, most aficionados of the genre will think first of H.P. Lovecraft and the Salem witch trials. You should now include The Witch in that list, a tightly crafted and deeply unsettling film that was a hit at Sundance and Fantastic Fest, and […]