Brianna Bullen She logged into her domain, an archive threatening to extinguish itself under its own over-stimulated, under-filtered information swarms. Pottering around for a minute, hyperlink diving, she quickly restrained herself and closed the browser. There was a subtle art to hyperlink diving: an arc into its deep data, not a plonk. A chosen…
CB Harvey You’re absolutely sure? The whole beard? Such a shame. You just don’t see ‘em like this anymore. But, you know. You’re the boss. Snip snip. Snip snip. Honestly, don’t feel you need to talk. Just stare impassively into the mirror, thinking your private thoughts. That’s…
Debra Benita Shaw ‘Tell me what you remember – eveything’. These may be the most significant words in Blade Runner 2049 (2017) evoking, as they do, not only the events of thirty years ago in diagetic time but the central concern of Ridley Scott’s original Blade Runner (1982/92/2007): memory and its relationship to what…
Gerry Canavan From the standpoint of the Anthropocene, memory is a troubled thing. The memories trapped within the skull of a single individual hardly register at all against the vertiginous, multi-million-year perspective of geologic time; art, literature, music, and other cultural achievements all hardly fare better, likewise flickering and disappearing with the rise and…
Roger Luckhurst Science fiction has long been interested in the possibilities of technological developments that might manipulate memory. According to historians of shifting patterns of memory like Eric Hobsbawm or Pierre Nora, memory in the West was increasingly located as the core of personal, collective and national identities through the nineteenth century and beyond.…
Dan Hassler-Forest On October 3, 2016, a good nine months after Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens premiered to enormous popular success and critical acclaim, Mr. Plinkett finally released his eagerly awaited video review of the sci-fi blockbuster. The 105-minute video essay, released simultaneously on various online video platforms, ratcheted up nearly 1.5…
Lincoln Geraghty The impact that the Star Wars figures had on the toy industry was phenomenal, as evidenced by the fact that “in 1978 Kenner sold over 26 million figures; by 1985, 250 million.” Profits from the toys, figures, lunchboxes, and video games eventually totaled $2.5 billion by the end of the first three…
Bertha Chin In the months leading up to the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens in December 2015, Changi International Airport in Singapore ran a plush toy promotion. Visitors to the airport and travellers would be able to purchase a toy featuring some of the franchise’s most beloved characters such as BB-8 and Chewbacca…
Emma Pett Attending large-scale fan conventions has never particularly appealed to me. Big crowds. Confined spaces. Long queues. Getting up at the crack of dawn to join said queues. Rampant commercial exploitation. The list is endless, and significantly compounded by the fact that I am not overly inclined towards collecting stuff. It was with a…
Toija Cinque There is something darkly broken yet emotionally beautiful about Rey. Like a pair of wings, she carries proudly the troubles of her past and present on her back. Still young, Rey was orphaned as a child, left behind on the planet Jakku, ascribing her disposition as disenfranchised and a seeming outsider (McKnight, 2016).…