Logic of Empire: Robert Jackson Bennett’s City of Stairs and Beyond
With superior power, technology, and a will to conquer, an empire uses that technological advantage to reach out and dominate/subjugate much of the world. The wealth of the world is plundered and bent to the service and the coffers of that empire. No dominance lasts forever, however, and the subjugated peoples learn how to fight back, to drive the invaders out of their lands, to regain independence. More so, as the wheel turns and the empire falls into eclipse and collapse, the formerly subjugated find that they have the geopolitical upper hand over their former colonial masters. This sounds awfully like the history of our world from the 19th century heyday of European Colonialism to the ‘rise of the rest’ and the relative decline of Western power happening right now, doesn’t it? City of Stairs, Robert Jackson Bennett’s first turn into secondary world fiction, tackles these concerns in a secondary world context.
Indy Genre: Holy Motors (2012)
Over the past several years, I’ve come to the conclusion that independent film is the place to search for the weird, fantastic, and creative. You know: the stuff of our genre. This is where labors of love and concepts a little too off beat to soothe conservative investors end up, where storytelling gets pushed to its limits… at times unsuccessfully. And with generally smaller budgets, if these films succeed, it’s not because they’ve leaned on visual spectacle and slow-motion pyrotechnics as a distraction from the fact that it’s really just a story about a white dude’s biceps and the director’s inescapable misogyny. Since this year’s Skiffy and Fanty theme is World SF, that dovetails perfectly with the hunt for smaller genre films. I hope you’re ready for subtitles. I promise, they won’t hurt a bit. We’re taking a ride on Holy Motors.
