Thomas Ligotti’s “The Town Manager” ends with the narrator offered the leadership role in a new town, a position that he has discovered from decades of exploitative policy leads to the slow destruction of the town but fattened wallet for the Town Manager. We are left asking if he will take the role, and how he would shape a society given what he’s seen. Fiction creates simulations able to portray the workings of human nature and reality, and the powerful flexibility of genre gives us untold ways to build a story off of core ideas. Weird tales translate supernatural elements into a contemporary setting, but it also branches out into two other genres that either uses magic and the occult or science and technology to reveal how the world is truly governed. Robert E. Howard’s fantasy story “The Phoenix on the Sword” and George R. R. Martin’s science fiction short “Sandkings” give us two different answers to “The Town Manager’s” leadership dilemma, from the ground as a king leading men or from above as a god pulling the strings of fate from behind the veil.
Continue reading “New Myths and Techno Prophecies: How Fantasy and Sci-Fi Prepare You For A Weird World”Author: Dane Thomsen
Dissecting The Thing’s Shapeshifting Game of Fear
John Carpenter’s 1982 cult classic horror film “The Thing” is an exploration of survival in unimaginably harsh conditions, those both created by the Antarctic environment and an unfathomable shape shifting opponent whose existence breaks reason and logic. There is much to say about the events in the research station destined to explode with deception, distrust, and panic, but it simply cannot be analyzed without first looking at a seemingly innocuous character scene: the pilot R.J. MacReady playing computer chess. Sipping his cocktail, our protagonist smugly enters a move he is convinced spells victory, but when the computer puts him in checkmate from a direction he hadn’t predicted, he angrily dumps his drink over the circuit boards and fries the computer to a burst of sparks. This small scene not only introduces us to “The Thing’s” core theme of imitation and its strategies, but is the film’s pivotal moment for which the entire climax rests, and is especially important to understand against an opponent that must move its pieces in secret and can capture any of your allies over to its side.
Continue reading “Dissecting The Thing’s Shapeshifting Game of Fear”Short Story Analysis: How ‘The Night Wire’ Connects You to Cosmic Horror
For human history, story has been a way for consciousness to explore worlds, to connect people to places they have never been and things they’ve never seen, to give the reader’s imagination access to the author’s. But with “The Night Wire,” H.E. Arnold uses story to tell us about how consciousness can now be connected to vast new worlds using technology, telling us of a fateful night in the lives of two telegraph operators receiving news reports from the strange town Xebico under attack by a mysterious fog and unidentifiable beings, directly linking our consciousness to a strange, weird world that we can observe in quiet, chilling terror but are unable to visit.
Continue reading “Short Story Analysis: How ‘The Night Wire’ Connects You to Cosmic Horror”Short Story Analysis: Walking the World As Tutuola’s Complete Gentleman
When Amos Tutuola’s “The Complete Gentleman” closes, the Nigerian folklorist had taken the reader on an adventure into a mysterious world with talking skulls and juju magic to save a captured young lady. As with so much other “weird” fiction, readers had journeyed to discover a world that is so hard to truly define that even the genre’s masters have a hard time qualifying it. For their The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, Ann and Jeff Vandermeer quote the genre’s grandfather H.P. Lovecraft’s definition that the weird “represents the pursuit of some indefinable and perhaps maddeningly unreachable understanding of the world beyond the mundane” (VanderMeer xv). In The Complete Gentleman, however, it is the reader’s pursuit of the world that takes center stage, and Tutuola is able to navigate them through the story’s mysterious, supernatural world by providing a capable, magical protagonist that can transform it into new shapes so its substance and lesson may be laid bare.
Continue reading “Short Story Analysis: Walking the World As Tutuola’s Complete Gentleman”Crowd Sourcing Human Survival: Why Civilization Requires Constant Technological Progress
Every major technological achievement reconstructs our civilization into a new one better able to sustain the increasingly large population building on top. Why is this important? As a civilization changes, it loses the ideas and infrastructure that supported previous technological eras and if it runs out of the resources the current level requires, the collapse will lead to immeasurable death. The perilous situation is best stated by philosopher Ayn Rand (1999) in Return of the Primitive & The Anti-Industrial Revolution: “In real life, there is no such thing as a gradual descent from civilization to savagery. There is a crash-and no recovery, only the long, drawn out agony of chaos, helplessness and random death, on a mass scale” (Rand, p. 273). Technological progress has set humanity down a path it can’t turn back from without suffering catastrophic consequences, but history has proven that the very mechanisms that built up civilization also improved its sustainability and we have no other option than to take full and immediate advantage of all our material, labor, and human resources if we hope to survive long term.
Continue reading “Crowd Sourcing Human Survival: Why Civilization Requires Constant Technological Progress”
Dane Thomsen 