timespace coodinates: early 1990s in the forests of Northern California
Sasquatch Sunset is a 2024 American absurdist fantasy drama film directed by David Zellner and Nathan Zellner, written by David Zellner, and starring Riley Keough, Jesse Eisenberg, Christophe Zajac-Denek and Nathan Zellner. The film follows a family of sasquatch over a period of one year. Ari Aster served as an executive producer under his Square Peg banner. (wiki)
timespace coodinates: remote farmhouse fifteen years after the end of civilization
Arcadian is a 2024 American action horror film directed by Ben Brewer. It stars Nicolas Cage as the father of two teenage boys, all trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. (wiki)
timespace coordinates: 19th century ‘bizarre winter realm’ Wisconsin
Hundreds of Beavers is a 2022 American slapstick comedy film directed by Mike Cheslik and written by Cheslik and Ryland Brickson Cole Tews. The film stars Tews as an applejack maker conflicting with beavers to win the hand of a fur trader’s daughter. (wiki)
Parallel is a 2024 American science fiction thriller film directed by Kourosh Ahari. The film stars Danielle Deadwyler. It is a remake of the 2019 Chinese film Parallel Forest by Lei Zheng. (wiki)
timespace coordinates: 2021 mountain valleys and backwoods hiking trails
Lovely, Dark, and Deep is a 2023 American horror film written and directed by Teresa Sutherland in their feature length debut, and starring Georgina Campbell. (wiki)
timespace coordinates: planet Vesta in the far future when interstellar cargo ships roam the galaxy
adult animated science fiction drama television series created by Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner (here is an interview)
Probably this is one of the most expected pieces of SF this year. And it delivers and is excellent on several accounts, contrasting with most of what gets labeled as SF nowadays. There is no lack of visually stunning cinematic works that seem to lack something – be it plotwise, involvement, or character development or are bound to repeat some form of techno-orientalist cliche with super-advanced yet missing Asians.
Is there any type of exoplanetary SF possible today when most of the future visions are somehow retro vintage SF golden age or very derivative? This was contradicted at the end of 2023 by Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner with a new independent, daring SF “eco-gothic” SF series production for the Max video-on-demand subscription channel that emanated out of the Californian animation industry. Scavengers Reign has somehow demonstrated that not everything is being consumed by the Disney Studios monster. Although I doubt there’s life after you fall into the D sarlacc’s capacious stomach.
Scavenger Reign stands closer to the European animation school and in particular the French comics and animation. It oozes Métal Hurlant and René Laloux with the geometric forests, panoramic vistas and its changeling alien ecosystems. But there is certainly also an anime/manga aspect – or the traces of the best of anime and manga. There is a touch of weird naturalism, of eerie transformations, and of horrific metamorphosis, particularly if one thinks in terms of the Katsuhiro Otomo’s masterpiece Akira from 1982 which was stunning for its realism and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind manga (not anime!) by Hayao Miyazaki. Biological genomes get hijacked, and the extended virome that permeates alien planets trafficks information across the species barrier. Everything is inter-species, everything sporulates, and telekinetic parasitism abounds (something close to the rove beetle eating baby ants while the ants think it is one of them – thx Ben Woodard for reminding me of this crazy true fable), but also the dance of co-evolution.
It is also the first US SF product (with help from South Korean animators – Studio JDD) – and it is no accident that it is an animation piece that finally does justice to some authors that have never been adapted for the screen such as the exoplanetary works of Joan Lyn Slonczewski (The Children Star) or only partially so – Jeff VanderMeer (particularly Borne and The Strange Bird two of my favorite pieces of new weird & postapocalyptic post- biopunk SF).
Otherness participates here at every level – from hallucinations of even the most common kind, say your lover’s voice and image that is being somehow puppeteered by something really different (do not think Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris), a plethora of really alien creatures using human carriers via their feelings and thoughts, but these thoughts and feelings somehow animating the alien critters as well in return. To affect means to be also affected (thinking here of Deleuze, but also Whithead’s Critique of Pure Affect). Also, we should not expect alien sentience to conform to our technological imaginary – it can be really very much a creature of strange and lowly appetites, irrespective of its extra sensorial powers. So you could really imagine the corporate alien slugs from Charles Stross’s Accelerando leaving sticky marks on Scavengers Reign’s world.
It is also one animation that takes into account our new scientific knowledge about species being as complex communities, interplays, or choreographies of genes or societies of genes of entirely different species. This knowledge constantly reshaped our understanding of what an individual being is or offers us continuous glimpses into how tight-knit such relationships are or how human agency or artificial agency dissolves or is being constantly rerouted within these webs of agency, non-agency, and misplaced intentionality. Parasitism is pervasive but it is also just one expression of the complexity and mutualism of such an ecosystem – it’s fleas upon fleas all the way down and up. There’s also a bizarre in-betweenness, much on this planet actually thrives on cross-fertilization with non-alien, human intruders and their creations (robots). There is a great scene where Azi and Levi (a human and robot partnership that survived the crash of the Demeter 277 cargo ship) who was cultivating and gardening new earthly gardens – Azi the robot is itself a walking garden. Inside its machinery there is some kind of new hybrid semiconductor with slime molds as a partner (it seems to me), maybe something close to unconventional computing is aiming at since some time.
Bramble The Mountain King is a grim adventure set in a world inspired by dark, Nordic fables. Explore the beautiful yet dangerous and twisted land of Bramble in your endeavour to rescue your sister. Traverse a wondrous landscape and survive deadly encounters with Bramble’s many hideous creatures.
Bramble: The Mountain King is a 2023 action-adventure video game developed by Dimfrost Studio and published by Merge Games.
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS (MINIMUM): OS: Windows 10 / Processor: Intel Core i5-2300 | AMD FX-4350 / Memory: 4 GB RAM / Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 570, 1 GB | AMD Radeon HD 7850, 2 GB / DirectX: Version 11 / Storage: 8 GB available space
TimeSpace Warps 