Cue the Eighties Soundtrack.

Is the endless Seventies tapeloop finally over? Are we reliving the early Eighties again now? Was Stranger Things somehow a harbinger of the changeover of the selections in the Replay Machine?

Virtual Reality: The Future is Not a Straight Line

Since Darwin, the ruling class of the West has clung on to a new myth to replace traditional Christianity; the myth of linear progress.

Lucifer's Technologies: Move Fast and Break Civilization

Fueled by technology, powerful forces are smashing America-- and in fact, the world-- to hell all in the name of the new religious dogma of "disruption". Nothing is safe- your job, your home, your family, your community, your future.

Not even reality itself, it seems.

Does Anyone Remember the Future?

I've begun watching Extant, the CBS Halle Berry vehicle on Amazon Prime. Like The Whispers, it's another of Steven Spielberg's attempts to conquer TV (television was in fact Spielberg's first love, not movies), and also like The Whispers, yet another example of his alien obsession.

His obsession seems to have gotten a lot more sophisticated since War of the Worlds, and seems to deal more with forces that seem more akin to Poltergeist than E.T.. It's not the greatest science fiction I've ever seen, though it's keeping my attention far more effectively than most TV shows seem to be able to these days. And it is a fairly typical example of what's going on in the genre. 

Virtual Reality: The Scam that Keeps Scamming

Yeah, that looks comfortable.

Note: Oculus Rift is having a press conference today 6/11 @ 1 PM EST. (see update)

Babies, Bathwater and the New Age

The New Age movement is one of the great enigmas of our time. You won't find hardly anyone willing to defend it or define themselves as a "New Ager," and yet the movement has slowly and quietly (some would say insidiously) changed the culture at large, for better and worse.

We Interupt this Singularity...

 

The best science fiction is cautionary. It's about projecting what is happening in the present, exaggerating it, blowing it out of proportion so it can be better understood. In theory, at least.

AstroGnostic: Revelations of the Matrix

The Matrix has any number of pop culture antecedents, but the most significant and by far the most well-known of them as far as the basic plot is concerned is 'The Cage' (aka 'The Menagerie'), the original Star Trek pilot that was reworked as a two-part episode during the original series' first season. 

We have three nearly-omnipotent figures with the power to alter a person's (specifically, an abductee's) perception of the physical world and do so while their subjects are imprisoned.

The Matrix: Agents/Angels/Archons/Aliens

These days it’s easy to forget what an astonishing feat of craftsmanship the first Matrix film is, given how it over-exposed and over-discussed it was. 

The technical, thematic and visual force The Matrix packed has yet to be equaled, especially by its own utterly forgettable sequels. The film is so complete, that any sequel seems redundant (just like the first Star Wars).

Secret Star Trek: The Oldest, Deadliest Myth

 

You might think being a geek should prime you for the Transhumanism Revolution, but in reality it should also prime you against it. 

For every Six Million Dollar Man there's a race of Cybermen or Borg or take your pick. William Gibson's Sprawl novels presented Transhuman modification as a ubiquitous consumer product, but what part of "dystopian" do you not understand? 

Fringe and the SciFi Singularity

 

I'm not exactly sure why, but my passion for and preoccupation with sci-fi has become practically religious over the past few months. 

A lot of you might be scratching your heads and asking, "how is this news?" But it's gotten to the point that if a book or a film or a TV show doesn't have some sci-fi or fantasy element, I have no interest in it at all.

Secret Sun Picture Parade: The Joke's on Us

This story ran last week, but just caught my attention. This didn't run on UFO Mystic or Filer's Files, it ran on Reuters, one of the world's largest and most respected news organizations. Interesting in and of itself, but I couldn't help but notice that an IBM ad discussing their work with "future threats" in Dubai was running when I visited the page. 

Quite a sync. 

Must-See TV: Cyberpunk Documentary from 1990

We saw clips of this for a recent William Gibson post, now here's the whole thing. Functions both as charmingly dated (g)nostalgia for disillusioned GenX'ers like myself and as history lesson for those who missed the movement the first time around. 

Caprica, Call of Duty and the Descent into Virtuality

Caprica's Daniel Greystone is an alternate reality version of Jaron Lanier and vice versa. For those of you who don't remember, Lanier - like Greystone - became a techno-celebrity in the early 90s by selling an idea without an application. 

The HyperGnostic Apotheosis of Cyberpunk

Vancouver- where else?

Since we're rapidly descending into the dystopian future that William Gibson prophesied in his sci-fi novels- particularly the Bridge Trilogy- I thought it would be an opportune time to look back on those heady days when geeks got cool and cool went geek. 

Stairway to Sirius: The Oscars and the Spiral Staircase

The festivities opened with this interesting shot, giving us the blue and gold motif of the set and showing us stagelights vaguely reminiscent of an Udjat...

Caprica and the Spi-Fi Ascendency

 

 OK, I need to rinse the rancid taste of Braintree out of my mouth...

A lot of you may have seen this already, but I'm so jazzed on this series I want to make sure the rest of you do as well. This is the prequel to the Battlestar Galactica revamp, but it's grabbed me in a way that BSG still has not (never fear, the missus and I have the first season DVDs and plan to dig into them soon).

The (Not So) Obligatory Avatar Post

I went to see Avatar at the same theater I saw The Day the Earth Stood Still. It's at the gateway of the New Jersey Skylands, in a once-enormous mall that has metastisized to an almost parodic size.

Secret Sun Best of the Zeros: The Movies

The Zeros were a decade in which memes from the underground bubbled up into the mass media and took over the mainstream in a way I would never thought possible. Twenty years ago topics like secret societies and sacred symbolism were purely fringe stuff. Today, they're literally kids' stuff. 

Lee Perry: Rest in Dub

There was a time in my life when I lived Dub morning, noon and night. I'm talking the old school Dub mainly, but also a lot of the work that people like Adrian Sherwood and Jack Dangers were putting out there as well.