Category: FICTION IN PHASE SPACE

  • Against the Day

    Pynchon, man, that dude throws a Molotov cocktail into the country club of proper English. Forget your Strunk & White, this ain’t your daddy’s prose. Pynchon, throws a Molotov cocktail into the cocktail party of proper English. Forget your white-glove grammar and your predictable sentence structures. This ain’t your momma’s book club. “Against the Day”…

  • Anatomy of the Swashbuckle

    You know the scene: the pirate swings across the chasm on a frayed rope, the fedora’d archaeologist narrowly outruns the crushing stone, the scoundrel slips from the trash compactor’s jaws with a wink and a spark. These moments weren’t just popcorn fodder—they were a battle of wits played out on the screen. It was a…

  • Andor

    The Nocturne of Small Betrayals: Doing this now, probably because of early Andor withdrawal symptoms onset.  Why Furst now? Because I’ve got maybe four episodes left of Andor Season Two, and then it’s back to the algorithmic sludge of prestige TV — safe, symmetrical, and so thoroughly test-screened it might as well be AI. I’m…

  • Ashes in the Ledger

    Sometimes I wonder how many social democrats and Jews of all extractions—bankers, pharmacists, tailors, teachers—found their hands brushing against the paper edges of stock certificates for Audi, Bayer, Hugo Boss, Thyssen, IG Farben, Krupp. How many of them sat in cramped apartments in Berlin or Vienna, trying to reconcile their progressive ideals or ancestral guilt…

  • Auctor, Author, Auteur

    I went to see One Battle After Another, and it hit that this was a collision of auctorish chaos, authorish genius, and auteurial precision—a live-fire test of what happens when a literary virus meets a human operating system. The film is based on Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland—one of his most authorish works, a sprawling, jittery tangle…

  • Bad Men

    “Bad men do bad things in the name of authority” James Ellroy BAM! Marilyn’s DEAD. The town’s REELING. Camelot’s a CON, and the dream machine’s bleeding out in the gutter. You want TRUTH? You want FILTH? You want the hard, fast, and lowdown LOWDOWN? Step inside, sweetheart. This is The Enchanters. Freddy Otash—ex-cop, badge-burnt, scandal-slinger,…

  • Block Time

    “Time is a junkie. Shoots up eternity and comes down as minutes. You’re not living in time—you’re processing it.” He sat cross-legged on a floor that never aged, scribbling with a pen that never ran out, his hand looping eternal cursive over blank sheets that devoured ink without a mark. This was Block Time—slabs of…

  • Bookstores

    The point of a bookshop is not to find what you are looking for. To believe otherwise is to mistake the architecture of the labyrinth for that of the supermarket.   A bookshop is not a catalog made flesh, nor a repository of answers to pre-formed questions. It is a topos, a place of sacred…

  • Clean Break

    I don’t buy that clean break bullshit, man. That’s for squares with lobotomized emotions and hearts stuffed with excelsior. No, the good stuff, the real fallout? That’s a compound fracture, a jagged mess of splintered bone and raw nerve. It throbs with a dull ache that creeps into your dreams, a constant reminder of the…

  • Cyberpunk

    Lately, I’ve been thinking about cyberpunk’s jagged grip on the collective id, its knack for haunting the edges of our digital decay like a rogue algorithm stuck on loop.  Cyberpunk isn’t just about dystopian futures—it’s about the failure of successive belief systems, each of which once promised order, progress, or salvation but collapsed under their…