Power over Spice is power over all This is the opening line of Dune: Part Two, spoken in the throat-singing ceremonial language of the fearsome Sardaukar warriors. It is also not true. Opening with a reference to spice, the mysterious substance which powers interstellar travel in the Dune Imperium and gives the Bene Gesserit sisters their psychic powers, the struggle over the control of which forms the foundation of the first arcs of the Dune story, is more than a bit of a misdirection. Spice is barely in the film at all. Yes, we see it in their food sometimes, we know ..read more

By Alissa Whitmore McCrystal, Erica. 2021. Gotham City Living: The social dynamics in the Batman comics and media. New York: Bloomsbury. Erica McCrystal’s ambitious Gotham City Living: The Social Dynamics in the Batman Comics and Media (2021) aims to trace the evolving representation of identity and criminality in the Batman universe, from the first comics in 1939 through 2019’s Joker film. The chapters range from documenting the challenges of growing up in Gotham to the ways in which the comics and films critique income inequality, but ultimately uphold capitalism by requiring a wealthy ..read more

By Christopher Marcatili McGavin, Kirsten (ed.). 2022. World Beyond: An anthology of Papua New Guinean Speculative Fiction. Sydney, Aus: Hibiscus Three. In the remote mountains of Papua New Guinea (PNG), Aula walks the jungles accompanied by her large magpie, Ko. There she hopes to find the spirit, Large Bird, and ask him to protect her from Kiki, the chief’s son. Far away in time, but perhaps not so far in space, Isla Grace is a Seeker, defending her domed community from the jade – a race of humans who have stripped the earth of its natural beauty and resources. Or so she has been told. And ..read more

By Anna Szolucha We’ve just launched a rocket into orbit so why is the way we think about technology so fundamentally wrong? A historic launch Regardless of what one thinks about Elon Musk’s growing techno-industrial imperium, this week’s orbital launch attempt of the Starship/SuperHeavy system built by SpaceX has already made history. With its 33 Raptor 2 engines that can generate 7,590 tonne-force of thrust at lift-off, the Starship/Super Heavy spacecraft is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. It stands at 120 metres tall and may dwarf the payload capacity of the Saturn V rocke ..read more

By Savannah Mandel “Jibaro” makes me wonder if we should listen more closely to the call of Sirens. This 17 minute long, Love Death Robots episode has me asking if the intent of such creatures of folklore is truly malicious. Have we been championing a different evil all along? Are there not wicked motives shifting beneath the surface of those sailors and knights who pillage all that is gold and shimmering from the bodies of the powerful creatures they capture? I’m speaking to the plot of the short episode, which touches on the brutality of a toxic, erotic, relationship through the dance of a s ..read more

By Emma Louise Backe I, like so many “elder Millennials” raised on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, and even the 1977 Hobbit animated movie, eagerly anticipated the release of Amazon’s Rings of Power. I remember sneaking sandwiches into the theaters when The Fellowship of the Ring was released; playing a Fellowship computer game in the basement of my friend’s house, getting too frightened by the approach of the Ringwraiths at The Prancing Pony to make it past the first phase of the adventure; spending weekends cosseted beneath blankets at a sleepover as we binged the extended version ..read more

After the release of the first deep field images produced by the new James Webb Space Telescope, a Twitter account playfully pretending to be the telescope posted the following: https://twitter.com/JWSTscope/status/1546646337545850880 Cute, of course, and not meant to be taken too seriously, despite the subtle flex of the telescope’s observational powers. But as someone interested in contemporary American religion and the space sciences, this tweet touched on something I’ve been thinking about in anticipation of the JWST’s first images—the omniscient telescope. An eye that can see everywhere a ..read more

By Samuel Gerald Collins Patkin, Terri Toles (2021). Who’s in the Game? Identity and Intersectionality in Classic Board Games. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland.  After taking a beating from video games, table-top games have made a startling come-back over the last twenty years, buoyed by a strong growth of Eurogames, imaginative indie titles and by a gaming world looking for variety. In academics, table-top games studies has also experienced sharp growth – albeit with a time lag. Like tabletop games themselves, the academic explosion of interest in tabletop gamin ..read more

By Vivian Asimos Limpár, Ildikó (2021) The truths of monsters: coming of age with fantastic media. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc. Positioned in the intersections of Monster Studies, literature studies and psychology rests The Truths of Monsters – a textual analysis of the role of monsters within young adult fantasy and science fiction novels, and some television shows. Limpár explores what monsters say about and to their typically adolescent audience, arguing that there are two ways monstrosity primarily finds a foothold in this genre. The first is the way monstrosity represen ..read more

I’ve yet to meet an academic who is not a geek. What it means to be either an academic or a geek is, by necessity, flexible and inconsistent, but I stand by this one data point, gleaned from a casual ethnography of my peers, colleagues, and mentors. Despite how many fellow D&D players, Trekkies, comic book fans and anime nerds I’ve come across in conference halls and classrooms, very few of them incorporate these interests into their academic work. Which is fine! Boundaries are important! There is no reason for the harsh, judgemental gaze of academia to turn its analytical and discursive c ..read more