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Karin L Kross

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The Terror: Infamy Is a Frustrating, Groundbreaking, and Timely Exploration of History and Horror

Mon Oct 21, 2019 11:00am 3 comments 2 Favorites [+]
Screenshot: AMC

When I talk about The Terror: Infamy, which concluded last Monday, the word that I keep using is frustrated. Frustrated because Infamy has two potentially great stories going on: a J-horror tale of intergenerational trauma, and a real-life suspense drama about being unjustly incarcerated by one’s own government, and neither of those stories is executed with the finesse that I was hoping for. Frustrated because I—an Asian-American adoptee of Korean descent—have been hungry all my life for more Asian-American representation in popular media; a prestige drama with a predominantly Asian core cast is a huge step forward and I was rooting for it hard. Frustrated because the incarceration of thousands of Japanese-American citizens under Executive Order 9066 is a piece of American history that we need to confront, particularly since American immigration policies of the last two years have made those events uncomfortably relevant all over again.

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Why You Should Be Watching The Terror, Series 1

Thu Sep 5, 2019 10:00am 6 comments 6 Favorites [+]
Screenshot: AMC

On August 29, 2019, Parks Canada released a stunning video of the interior of one of Sir John Franklin’s lost ships, HMS Terror. In the first detailed exploration since the wreck was rediscovered in 2016, archaeologists sent a remote drone to explore the wreck and found a stunningly well-preserved ship—“frozen in time” as the inevitable phrase goes—that almost looks as if the crew simply walked quietly away one day. There are plates still on the shelves; a chamber-pot remains on the floor of an officer’s cabin; and Captain Francis Crozier’s desk and chair stand upright under a soft coat of ocean sediment.

This was obviously big news for history nerds and aficionados of the Royal Navy Discovery Service’s misadventures, but it was also big news for fans of AMC’s The Terror. When The Terror Series 1 premiered in 2018, it passed under the radar for many, but over the last year it has picked up a long tail of devotees. Its release on Hulu brought a new round of attention, stoked further by August’s premiere of Series 2, otherwise known as The Terror: Infamy, as AMC made the (arguably questionable) decision to take the title The Terror and turn it into an anthology series.

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The Stars Look Very Different: Strange Stars by Jason Heller

Tue Jun 12, 2018 3:00pm 4 comments 1 Favorite [+]

Quick: when someone says “science fiction and pop music”, who do you think of?

These days, depending on your tastes and avidity for what’s new out there, it would not be entirely surprising if your mind jumped to Janelle Monáe. But a lot of people are going to immediately think of David Bowie—to whom Monáe herself would acknowledge a debt. Fittingly, he is the organizing principle of Jason Heller’s Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decade Sci-Fi Exploded. Heller—a Hugo-winning music writer who has contributed to Pitchfork, the AV Club, the Atlantic, and the New Yorker—starts with “Space Oddity” and ends with “Ashes to Ashes”, and in between he provides a whirlwind survey course of how science fiction shaped popular music and pop culture from 1970 to 1980. He weaves a chronological narrative of science fiction-influenced music—some world-changingly significant, some probably best forgotten—and science fiction’s rise in popular culture, occasioned by everything from Star Trek to the novels of J.G. Ballard and Samuel Delany, to—of course—Star Wars.

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The Culture Reread: Prosthetic Conscience (Consider Phlebas Part 7)

Tue Jun 5, 2018 4:00pm 13 comments 9 Favorites [+]

Welcome back to the Culture reread! Apologies for the gap in posting; things have not quite gone according to plan, but I’m back now to finish off Consider Phlebas, with this and one more post to follow shortly. After these last posts, I’ll be taking a few weeks off to get rolling on The Player of Games.

Today, though, it’s time for the last act of Bora Horza Gobuchul and his quest for the Culture’s lost Mind. 

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Series: The Culture Reread

The Culture Reread: Eschatologist (Consider Phlebas, Part 6)

Tue May 8, 2018 1:00pm 7 comments 4 Favorites [+]

Welcome back to the Culture reread! This week, Horza and his crew continue their exploration of the Command System, where surprises and violence await. As we approach the conclusion of Consider Phlebas, the action ramps up, and Horza’s promises to the CAT crew that this was going to be “easy in, easy out” are increasingly shown to be lies.

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Series: The Culture Reread

The Culture Reread: Irregular Apocalypse (Consider Phelbas, Part 4)

Tue Apr 3, 2018 1:00pm 9 comments 6 Favorites [+]

Welcome back to the Culture reread! Apologies for having missed last week; it turns out that traveling and reread posting are not necessarily fully compatible. But we’re back on track now, approximately halfway through Consider Phlebas. This week, we finally learn exactly what Damage is. Horza catches up with Kraiklyn and rejoins the crew of the Clear Air Turbulence, and an acquaintance reappears.

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Series: The Culture Reread

The Culture Reread: No More Mr. Nice Guy (Consider Phlebas, Part 3)

Tue Mar 13, 2018 1:00pm 23 comments 10 Favorites [+]

Welcome back to the Culture reread! Today in chapters 5 and 6 of Consider Phlebas, Kraiklyn continues to prove himself an absolutely terrible captain, another heist goes dreadfully wrong, and Horza is captured by a cult. This entire sequence is one of the most revolting things I’ve read in almost any book anywhere. Don’t read this section while you’re eating, and don’t count on having an appetite for a while after.

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Series: The Culture Reread

The Culture Reread: Determinist (Consider Phlebas, Part 2)

Tue Feb 27, 2018 1:00pm 14 comments 10 Favorites [+]

Welcome to the Culture Reread! Today in chapters 3 and 4 of Consider Phlebas, Horza gets some new friends—well, one, anyway—and in our first “State of Play” break, we drop in on the Culture for a look at the war from their side.

As I write, I am currently reeling a little from the news that Amazon has decided to make Consider Phlebas into their own Altered Carbon, or something like that. Absent a showrunner or cast, I can’t really bring myself to be optimistic or pessimistic at this point, but I can think of a few ways that Amazon could really screw this up. On that subject Damien Walter has a post at Medium that I don’t disagree with. We’ll see.

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Series: The Culture Reread

The Culture Reread: Nervous Energy (Consider Phlebas, Part 1)

Tue Feb 13, 2018 1:00pm 50 comments 36 Favorites [+]

Welcome to the Culture Reread! Today is the first proper post of the series, and we’re off with the prologue and chapters 1 and 2 of Consider Phlebas.

Consider Phlebas, the first Culture novel that Banks completed and published, appeared in 1987. It takes place against the background of a long and destructive war between the Culture and the Idirans. The Culture, of course, is more or less human as we know it, post-scarcity, essentially socialist, and, until the war, largely thought of as a bunch of hedonistic pacifists; the Idirans are three-meter-tall tripedal beings bent on a war of religious conquest. At the time of Consider Phlebas, the war has been going on for four years, with enormous casualties on either side and no sign of surrender either way. One might expect this novel to be the story of some key conflict in the course of that war, something history-changing—whether that’s the case, well, we shall see.

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Series: The Culture Reread

The Precise Nature of the Catastrophe: Welcome to the Culture Reread

Tue Jan 30, 2018 1:00pm 52 comments 54 Favorites [+]

The last time I had anything of length to say about the Culture novels of Iain M. Banks, I remarked with regard to Consider Phlebas, Player of Games, Use of Weapons, and the novella The State of the Art that “one of these four works is, in my opinion, Banks’s finest; which one and why I think so is a matter for another, longer examination.” Well, the time has come for that longer examination and … I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a little while longer for the details. But I hope to make it worth your while.

Over the next several months (well in to 2019 and possibly beyond, if I’m honest, given a biweekly publishing schedule and novels that get increasingly doorstop-like as we progress), I’ll be making my way through the Culture novels, in order of publication. We’ll kick things off properly in two weeks, but before we begin, I thought I’d launch with a little background on the series and why I love it, and some remarks on how I’ll be going about this.

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Series: The Culture Reread

Celebrating the Revolutionary Optimism of Iain M. Banks

Thu May 18, 2017 9:00am 15 comments 11 Favorites [+]
Art by Paul Youll

I was all set to finish a piece on the characters who inhabit the world of Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels, the advanced space-humans and artificial intelligences that drive the novels with their struggles and adventures. I’ve gotten distracted from that original plan, though. For one thing, a bad case of news poisoning has endowed the following paragraph from Banks’s 1994 essay “A Few Notes on the Culture” with a lot more grim humor than they had around this time last year:

The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what-works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is—without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset—intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

This particular moment in history—when unfettered capitalism, oligarchy, and toxic forms of nationalism all too often tend to be the order of the day—is quite a time to be reading about a socialist post-scarcity interstellar civilization, and one can definitely be forgiven for approaching the novels in a spirit of escapism. But one can also find inspiration in the progressive and optimistic worldview that underpins Banks’s novels, which was neatly summarized by the man himself.

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Series: Space Opera Week

Pandora’s Post-Apocalypse: The Girl With All the Gifts

Mon Feb 27, 2017 3:00pm 3 comments Favorite This
Photo: Aimee Spinks/Saban Films

Let’s face it: a lot of us are pretty weary of zombies by now. On those grounds it might be tempting to give The Girl With All the Gifts a miss. (In fact my spouse told me afterward that if he’d known in advance about the “Hungries,” as they’re called in the film, he would have never set foot in the theatre due to sheer exhaustion with the genre.) But if you did, you’d be missing out on a genuinely good take on zombie horror with a terrific protagonist.

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Story of Your Purpose: Arrival

Fri Nov 11, 2016 11:00am 13 comments 2 Favorites [+]
Screenshot: Lava Bear Films

I’m no veteran of film festivals—and indeed, I only started going to Austin’s Fantastic Fest last year. But if it ends up being the only film festival at which I’m a regular, I’m fine with that. It’s a “genre” festival, a term which encompasses high-profile fantasy like Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children (complete with Tim Burton on the festival red carpet), sensational (if not SFnal) art films like Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden, a surprise screening of M. Night Shyamalan’s SPLIT, and some magnificently disreputable midnight movie trash from all over the world. This year also featured horror short films presented as VR experiences, a “Satanic Panic Escape Room,” and the FF traditional evening of debates settled by fisticuffs at a local boxing gym.

And, yes, well, it happened over a month ago, didn’t it. You may be wondering why I’m only just now getting around to writing about more of the films I saw. Well, when Fantastic Fest 2016 kicked off, I was 37.5 weeks pregnant. The weekend after it ended—the weekend that I originally had planned to use to catch up on my reviews—the baby arrived a week ahead of schedule. So I’ve been a little busy since then.

It would probably take another month altogether to write complete reviews for every film that I saw, so for now I’m going to stick to a few specific highlights. I’ll start with Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, which opened the festival and which launches nationwide this weekend.

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Of Myths and Zombies: The Girl With All the Gifts

Tue Oct 4, 2016 10:00am Favorite This

Let’s face it: a lot of us are pretty weary of zombies by now. On those grounds it might be tempting to give The Girl With All the Gifts—one of a handful of YA genre novel adaptations screening at this year’s Fantastic Fest—a miss. (In fact my spouse told me afterward that if he’d known in advance about the “Hungries”, as they’re called in the film, he would have never set foot in the theatre due to sheer exhaustion with the genre.) But if you did, you’d be missing out on a genuinely good take on zombie horror with a terrific protagonist.

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