And so the culture wars rage on. In the latest instalment, the World Fantasy Award has decided to retire the bust of HP Lovecraft, traditionally used for the award. The new image for the award is yet to be decided. This has happened hot on the heels of the Hugo Awards controversy and Gamergate, and the world of speculative fiction has once again erupted into acrimony.

It’s not hard to see that the future is getting bleaker. Science fiction and speculative fiction, as responses to present circumstances, are increasingly darkening to match the world as is. Consider the difference between, say, Star Trek – which had the prime directive, the innate and vital goal of exploration and intergalactic diplomacy – and Interstellar, the driving conceit of which is that Earth has run out of food. Across subgenre boundaries, and even languages, we’re bombarded with images straight out of that quintessential British apocalypse novel The Day of the Triffids.

The Independent newspaper recently reported the British Broadcasting Corporation is designing a television program in which unemployed and low paid workers will compete against each other, The Hunger Games style, for cash prizes. The newspaper report is one of several recent things that have got me thinking about how aspects of dystopian cinema are bleeding into real life.

It is, by turns, a love letter to seventies science fiction; a study of the clash between Hollywood filmmaking culture and the mores of the European avant garde; and a celebration of unrestrained creativity and artistic determination. I don’t mean to sound trite, but it is a film every creative, whatever they do, should see.

A Book of Endings Deborah Biancotti Twelth Planet Press Among the deleterious effects of the separation of genre from mainstream fiction – a separation that is in many ways a marketing invention – is the marginalisation of various authors. It’s a process that affects the genre writers more than the mainstream ones. Genre is, after […]