I’m about 30% of the way through Catching Fire, the second book in the Hunger Games trilogy, and something that jumped out at me in the first volume is even more apparent in the glare of publicity around the film … Continue reading
As part of a larger project I’m preparing on “blueprint culture” — fan subcultures devoted to drawing, drafting, charting, mapping, and playing the worlds of science-fiction media — here is a brief history, excerpted from my book manuscript on special … Continue reading
The death of Ralph McQuarrie on March 3 marked the loss of one of the key founders of the Star Wars franchise. McQuarrie’s authorial status within that vast transmedia network had for decades been subsumed under the cannibalizing sign of … Continue reading
I’m excited to be guest-editing a special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures on objects and artifacts in media fandom! The CfP follows. Alongside its consumption and transformation of texts, media fandom has always been marked by its consumption and … Continue reading
This summer will see the release of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, a project weighted by considerable expectations given its connection to the thirty-year-old Alien franchise. The particulars of that connection have been kept vague by producers — witness the tortuous finessing of … Continue reading
I’m an associate professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Swarthmore College. Before that I was a Ph.D student in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, Bloomington; before that a master’s student in Communication Studies at the … Continue reading
This post from the New York Times Bits blog is one of the first I’ve seen to address the problems — and opportunities — likely to be created by personal-fabrication technology, aka 3D printing, when it encounters copyright law designed for … Continue reading
Here’s a smart writeup on a new book collecting the artwork of Chris Foss, the distinctive and influential British artist whose paintings have graced the cover of many a science-fiction novel while circulating independently as quanta of outré visualization on … Continue reading
Ordinarily I’d start this with a spoiler warning, but under our current state of summer siege — one blockbuster after another, each week a mega-event (or three), movies of enormous proportion piling up at the box office like the train-car derailment that … Continue reading
Adapting Watchmen After 9/11 For a work that gives off such a potent impression of originality and singularity, Watchmen has always been haunted by the concept of the near-parallel, the skewed copy, the version. Start with its setting, an alternate-reality 1985. Cocked … Continue reading