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Gangsta’s hyperbolically-staged fantasies of omnipotence were always nouveau-riche giveaways, which, like the bling, sang out that these working-class black Americans had not yet achieved the easy way in the world, the casual confidence that are the birthrights of those born to wealth and power. Th…

Yet Lovecraft's texts are exemplary of Weird, rather than straightforwardly Gothic, fiction. Weird fiction has its own consistency, which can be most clearly delineated by comparing it to two adjacent modes, Fantasy and the Uncanny. Fantasy (and Tolkien is the exemplar here) presupposes a completed…

[...] The arid shopping mall at the end of history opened up as the only possible future. Worse than the career opportunities that never knocked were the ones that did: jobs for everyone in the striplit wall-to-wall mart of Time Out of Joint America in which it is 1955, forever... No shadows to h…

In this version of Westworld, it isn’t the threat of violence against humans that commands our attention so much as the routine brutality to which the hosts are subjected. Ford justifies this by insisting that the androids “are not real”, that they “only feel what we tell them to feel”. Yet it’s no…

Yet The Leftovers does not concern itself overmuch with the enigma of the Sudden Departure. Lost became self-parodically enmeshed in a madly proliferating web of embedded mysteries that by the end seemed as if they were being invented simply to keep the intrigue going, and could never be satisfacto…