BLOOD KNIFE

06/17/2022

06/17/2022

06/17/2022

Imposter syndrome is an epidemic among young professionals—or is it? We live in an age of huckster CEOs, fraudulent schemes, and nonsense jobs. What if all of us really are imposters?

New from Raquel S. Benedict.

Insecurity and imposter syndrome in an age of hucksters and phonies.

01/25/2022

"BEFORE “OFFERING SOLUTIONS,” SCI-FI MUST ACTUALLY GRAPPLE WITH THE MATERIAL REALITIES OF OUR PRESENT"

by Eli Horowitz

Science fiction that avoids grappling with material reality has little to offer besides blithe fantasy and nightmarish realpolitik.

01/10/2022

CYBERPUNK FACES A CHOICE BETWEEN STARK MATERIALISM AND SUBJECTIVITY

by Lapo Lappin

"The release of the long-awaited Cyberpunk 2077 was expected to be something of a turning point for the cyberpunk genre. Christening a work after a whole subculture is a bold move—even so, Cyberpunk 2077 managed to provide this turning point, if only by clearly staking out the battle-lines between two competing factions for the legacy of the genre. We might broadly think of these factions as those pursuing a “Hegelian” vision of cyberpunk, in which the focus is a materialist analysis of a technocratic future, and “Kierkegaardian” cyberpunk, pursuing a more subjective and existential approach that concerns itself primarily with individual experience of both the now and of an imagined future. Hegelian cyberpunk focuses on what the future would look like, from a God’s-eye view; Kierkegaardian cyberpunk focuses on what the future would look like for us."

The empty dystopia of Cyberpunk 2077 highlights the dangers of modern cyberpunk's pure Hegelian materialism.

01/10/2022

DENIS VILLENEUVE SUCCEEDS IN BRINGING FRANK HERBERT’S SCI-FI EPIC BACK TO THE SCREEN, BUT AT THE COST OF SOME OF ITS STRANGENESS.

by Kurt Schiller

Denis Villeneuve succeeds in bringing Frank Herbert's sci-fi vision back to the screen in epic fashion, but at the cost of some of its strangeness.

01/10/2022

SCIENCE FICTION IN NON-SPECULATIVE ART

by Kola Heyward-Rotimi

By applying the tools of sci-fi to the here and now, "future-present" fiction provides essential deconstruction for an uncertain moment.

01/10/2022

THE 40-YEAR RISE AND FALL OF CYBERSPACE’S SYMBOLIC UNREALITY.

by Kurt Schiller

Cyberspace is dead. What's left is pure capitalism.

01/10/2022

HOW THE DRIVE FOR EASILY MARKETABLE, MASS-CONSUMABLE CHILDREN’S MEDIA STIFLES COMPLEXITY AND CREATIVITY

by Malcolm Rambert

The push for children's entertainment with mass-market appeal is creating flat, boring media that doesn't teach kids anything.

11/17/2021

"HOW AKIRA’S SCI-FI HORROR EXPLORES BODY, ARTIFICE, AND EXPLOITATION UNDER CAPITALISM"

by Meabh Cadigan

How Akira's sci-fi horror explores body, artifice, and exploitation under capitalism.

11/17/2021

Synthwave music selection from Jess Levine

"As a genre, synthwave fits naturally into the mold of both the storytelling “concept album” and the instrumental album. Synthwave and its brethren are love letters to the soundtracks of the Eighties cyberpunk movies from which the musical genres emerged—Vangelis’s classic score to Blade Runner (1982), John Carpenter’s accompaniment to Escape from New York (1981), and the like. Its origins as a pastiche of movie scores allows cyberpunk music to tell its stories by referencing the sonic and musical tropes employed in these scores—sometimes taking it even further through the incorporation of foley."

Synthwave and its brethren are love letters to the soundtracks of the Eighties cyberpunk movies from which they ultimately emerged.

11/17/2021

"THE 40-YEAR RISE AND FALL OF CYBERSPACE’S SYMBOLIC UNREALITY."

by Kurt Schiller

"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding . . ."

— William Gibson, Neuromancer

Cyberspace is dead. What's left is pure capitalism.

11/17/2021

"LEIGH JANIAK’S FEAR STREET SETS OUT TO REVIVE THE TEEN SLASHER, BUT SEEMS CONTENT TO PLAY AROUND WITH ITS CO**SE"

by Kurt Schiller

Leigh Janiak's Fear Street sets out to revive the teen slasher, but seems content to play around with its co**se.

11/17/2021

Dune (2021) review from BLOOD KNIFE

"DENIS VILLENEUVE SUCCEEDS IN BRINGING FRANK HERBERT’S SCI-FI EPIC BACK TO THE SCREEN, BUT AT THE COST OF SOME OF ITS STRANGENESS."

by Kurt Schiller

Denis Villeneuve succeeds in bringing Frank Herbert's sci-fi vision back to the screen in epic fashion, but at the cost of some of its strangeness.

10/13/2021

Masamune Shirow's cyberpunk masterpiece envisions a world where people, not just products, are mass produced.

07/27/2021

"Of all the eerie and uncanny images that the human psyche can conjure in dreams, the vision of an elderly crone is the most subliminally horrifying."

The monster most emblematic of the past decade of horror Is a naked old woman.

07/25/2021

"On the night of August 8th, 1969, four followers of failed-musician-turned-cult-leader Charles Manson murdered five people, including the actress Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant at the time"

Mary Harron's American Psycho and Charlie Says pick apart the figure of the white male patriarchal killer, revealing the impotence hidden deep within.

07/19/2021

"HORROR MEDIA HAS BECOME A VITAL AND TRANSGRESSIVE ARTISTIC INFLECTION POINT FOR WOMEN"

Transgressive and disinhibited, the horror genre has become a vital artistic inflection point for women.

06/29/2021

MYERSCOUGH & SKELTON

Short Fiction by Tim Jeffreys

"They came only on grey days, or so it seemed to Victor."

They came on days of no wind. Of silence. Stillness. Those were the days. Oh yes indeed. Those were the days to expect a visit from Myerscough and Skelton.

06/20/2021

This month we present two short tales of the strange and the unnatural, one smothered in oppressive heat, the other in the shadowed dark of overcast skies.

The first of which is "Swelter and Shade" by Wendy Nikel

"By the time they found him and pried his car doors open, the old man was dead, the back of his head melted to the leather seat."

06/13/2021

"Sarah Monette's ``The Goblin Emperor`` is a political fantasy mired in its pursuit of a kinder, gentler neoliberalism."

Sarah Monette's celebrated novel "The Goblin Emperor" is a work of political fantasy—just not in the way intended.

06/08/2021

"HOW AN OBSCURE SHORT STORY BY DAVID FOSTER WALLACE ALMOST PREDICTED OUR IMMINENT DEEPFAKES HELLSCAPE"

David Foster Wallace's short story "Datum Centurio" presaged the rise of deepfakes, as well as their potentially widespread social and cultural fallout.

06/02/2021

Issue Ten is out now:

"REVOLUTION NIHIL_
We seek eternally to overthrow the systems that undergird our lives—history, property, trauma, and capital. This month we explore the tumultuous rebirth of new orders within our world and within our selves."

https://bloodknife.com/

A digital magazine about sci-fi, horror, and capitalism. Support us on Patreon.

05/05/2021

"GNOSTIC HORROR AND THE FALL INTO HISTORY
MODERNITY BEGAN WITH THE DISINTEREST AND APATHY OF COSMIC HORROR—BUT THE 21ST CENTURY HAS LED US SOMEWHERE FAR DARKER."

by Kay Halloran

* *

“Now consider the possibility that we’ve always had a disembodied alien lifeform living among us. Invisible yet able to occupy minds and alter them. It hides in plain sight, everywhere. This mind boasts of its own omnipotence… it informs us that we are no more than– than submissive instruments of its will. Then deliberately wills us to defy its rules? All the while, it vows to punish every pre-ordained breach of those rules, however brief or minor—with eternal, agonizing torture in a cosmic concentration camp. What name might we give such an omnipresent evil?“

“God. You’re talking about God.”

— Grant Morrison, Nameless

The combination of cosmic horror and gnostic thought is a perfect embodiment of modernity's dark antipathy to human life and human misery.

04/27/2021

"On April 12th, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to journey into outer space. It was one of humanity’s most astonishing achievements, granting Gagarin—who a few years earlier was in training to be a steelworker—a perspective on existence previously undiscovered by man. His supervisors feared it would drive him mad."

From Alien and Solaris to Event Horizon, sci-fi horror has found dark meaning and grim portents in the psychological terror of space travel.

04/19/2021

"Since the debut of his first published work, “Shiva, Open Your Eye” in 2001 in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, author Laird Barron has become a leading voice in cosmic horror, weird, and crime fiction. Across five novels and five collections of short fiction, Barron has charted a unique style that blends stark contemporary realism—deeply concerned with modernity, and the lives of working people—with bleak horror, overt supernatural and cosmic forces, and good old-fashioned weird fiction influences."

"Cosmic horror often reveals itself indirectly. The fossil record; rings in an ancient tree; occulted societies and customs handed down through millennia."

04/17/2021

"WE LIVE AMIDST THE DEAD TEMPLES OF SLUMBERING, INDUSTRIAL GODS. WHAT WILL WE DO IF THEY WAKE ONCE MORE?"

We find ourselves within a bleak landscape, haunted by the dead gods of our industrial past—and there are those who would wake them once more.

04/10/2021

Stay tuned for our 9th issue coming soon...

04/10/2021

Issue Eight is out now:

"CLASH, CONQUEST, COMBINE_

Our lives are driven by concepts and forces in ceaseless opposition, a dialectic of simultaneous destruction and creation. This month we explore the turmoil of concepts in opposition, and what lies beyond."

https://bloodknife.com

A digital magazine about sci-fi, horror, and capitalism. Support us on Patreon.

03/29/2021

"It’s not easy being a past event. The very temporality of my existence is all wrong, and it’s not clear how to fix it. My birthday was last week and I asked everyone there to call me “that thing that happened with the helicopter story” but they just laughed."

"I already have the whole story tattooed on my chest, but I want radiating circles of posts calling it violent, an alt-right troll, triggering..."

03/21/2021

"STAR TREK’S IMPERIALIST CONTRADICTIONS HIGHLIGHT THE ROLE OF “THE FRONTIER” IN THE AMERICAN MYTHOS."

Star Trek's imperialist contradictions highlight the lasting role of "the frontier" in the American mythos.

03/18/2021

"A MORAL, SPIRITUAL, AND ONTOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION OF A CRITICAL INTELLECTUAL CONCERN."

by Vera Drew & Trevor Drinkwater

Godzilla and King Kong will soon face off in the ultimate battle of the behemoths. Which of these two colossal combatants is it morally correct to root for?

03/05/2021

"THE PAST HAS ITS OWN ROMANCE—BUT THIS, LIKE ALL RELATIONSHIPS, CAN ONLY BE FULLY UNDERSTOOD IN RETROSPECT."

by Colin Broadmoor

Retrofutures project the promised future of past technology onto the present. What happens when that technology becomes all that we are?

03/04/2021

"The figure of the alien requires no introduction. It’s a category and a concept that is as common on immigration forms as it is in literature and film, simultaneously representing a single entity and the existence of many others of its kind while signaling dissolution, destabilization, and invasion. "

The genre-bending Tamil sci-fi s*x comedy Super Deluxe turns the figure of the alien into s*xual deconstruction.

02/16/2021

www.bloodknife.com

02/16/2021

BY ANNIE ROSE MALAMET — Le***an vampires are often dismissed as empty titillation: sapphic sadists who exist only to please a h***y male audience. But this enduring horror figure is much more than that—far from being empty objectification, the le***an vampire functions as a vital window into kink, ritual, and leather history.

Often dismissed as titillation for male audiences, the figure of the le***an vampire functions as a vital window into kink, ritual, and leather history.

02/15/2021

To understand the implicit lies and exploitation of modern capitalism, look no further than a 1969 film about a non-stop dance competition. New from Ryan Lambert.

To understand the implicit lies and exploitation of modern capitalism, look no further than a 1969 film about a non-stop dance competition.

02/09/2021

Check out the latest issue: www.bloodknife.com

02/08/2021

STORMTROOPERS AND THE WORK OF EMPIRE
THE TOOLS OF EMPIRE AREN’T ALWAYS SO OBVIOUS.
by Matt Houle

One of the first introductions we get to the Imperial Stormtrooper in Star Wars is the observation that “only Imperial Stormtroopers are so precise.”

The moment comes early in the film, as Ben Kenobi and his soon-to-be protege Luke Skywalker are observing the smoldering wreckage of a Jawa sand crawler. The bodies of the robed desert scavengers lay scattered haphazardly across the sands.

“Precision,” of course, is less about hitting a target and more about producing the same result every time. And considering how infrequently we see those Stormtroopers manage to accurately shoot things, one might imagine that Old Ben is actually talking not about aim but rather about how frequently Imperial Stormtroopers massacre civilians in the aftermath of a battle.

George Lucas doesn’t actually show the audience how the Imperial Stormtroopers slaughtered the Jawas, but he does show us that the aftermath of the massacre has enough in common features with other Imperial massacres as to make the perpetrators identifiable. The realization that the faceless white-clad Stormtroopers might soon be knocking at the doors of his adopted family drives Luke to rush home, only to find that the very massacre he dreaded has already occurred. His family is dead at the hands of a distant empire.

This event stands out to me now while I search for ways to understand my own experience working for Empire (in a broader sense than just The Empire of a galaxy far, far away).

https://bloodknife.com/stormtroopers-and-the-work-of-empire/

The agents of empire take many forms—but whether in sci-fi or our own world, they're all designed to produce the same result.

02/08/2021

Blood Knife's Kurt Schiller joins the podcast to talk about the post-scarcity communist society depicted in Iain M. Banks Culture series and how it seems to have attracted the most unexpected of fans