The Irreverent Voice of Transdimensional Analysis
WASTE OF SPACE
By DAVID JAMES KEATON
“TAKE YOUR PROTEIN PILLS AND PUT YOUR HELMET ON”
🚀 DAVID BOWIE
The resilience of the American space program is best embodied by the astronaut movie that tanks every year. And they just keep coming. Why, Lord, why? Let’s try to solve this riddle by running the gauntlet of the latest batch of terrible astronaut movies.
High Life! This might have been the best, (meaning worst) of the bunch. The plot seems to be some bullshit about a bunch of death row inmates flying to a black hole and to do fertility experiments? Then slowly killing each other off? And there was a fuck room. Why this wasn’t called Fuck Room is its own riddle. A riddle wrapped in an enigma straddled in a fuck room. And when the inmates aren’t taking turns in the fuck room, they’re Pondering Life, trudging around the most low-tech depiction of a “spaceship” outside of a student film. Seriously, it makes Dark Star look like the Death Star. I’m 100% convinced this was filmed at Initech. But sometimes the low-rent effects pay off. Something about an office building as a spaceship works for me. But when bodies are dropped out the front door onto the sidewalk, er, I mean out the airlock and into unforgiving and awe-inspiring void of space… it was pretty fucking funny. But I did enjoy their depiction of what happens to a body in a black hole. Spagettification! I am glad High Life acknowledged that these celestial toilets go squeeeeeeeeeeeesh rather than magically morph into an Interstellar bookcase made of love. But yeah, High Life is one of those skeevy movies you always assume is headed for incest even though no one is related. Just a feeling. And beside some striking imagery right out of Visitor Q (when that one astronaut is lactating milk and just sitting there furious because she realized someone impregnated then plucked a baby out of her), mostly you’ll be wondering why the cockpit is the rec room at Dunder Mifflin.
Speaking of toilets! Then we got, what, Lucy in the Sky, about some astronaut who shit her pants in her car instead of in outer space? Shit your pants in the rocket, lady, that’s what it’s made for! Don’t get your shits on Route 66. Talk about burying the lede. In her pants. She’s floating in a most peculiar way… NEXT.
So nobody saw those two movies except me, then the same nobodies lined up for this Ad Astra therapy session. Has there been a worse title? More like Bad Astra am I right! More like Dad Astra. Sad Bastra(d)? Lots of dad shit is my point. And underpopulated! Like every movie these days. It had all this TALK of world building, but they never showed this world built. So it gave the whole movie the foundation of a hazy, no-stakes dream sequence. And, of course, it rips off Apocalypse Now, 2001, but not in any interesting ways. Cool moon chase though! It’s like a car chase, but very quiet! In space no one can hear you go zoom. But the stink of dad shit lingers on this thing like Aqua Velva, something about Brad Pitt looking for his dad at the ass end of space. The Ass End of Space here is played by stone-faced veteran Tommy Lee Jones, who continues to work “not wanting to act” into character motivation. Spinning straw into lead! And there was some dad shit in High Life too. So maybe that’s the Rosetta Stone here. Sad Dads. I’m guessing there’s probably plenty of dad shit in First Man but I had to skip that one. Wake me up when it’s The Last Man (in Space) because nobody gives a fuuuuuuuuuuck. Seriously, it tanked too. They all tank! More tanks than Tiananmen Square up in this bitch. More like AstroNOTS am I right? But why does this keep happening?
My new theory is that people just don't give a shit about space right now, if they ever did, because their concern is with the human condition and general state of terribleness on terra firma. And when Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing we can do, heading for social oblivion seems more urgent than quantum oblivion. So fuck astronauts, and fuck all those little brats who wanted to be one when they grew up. They already cracked that code at birth when they shit their pants and everybody clapped.
Interdimentionally Body-Slamming Pop Culture
FEEDING OUR DARKNESS:
ALI SEAY’S
TO OFFER HER PLEASURE
Ali Seay’s latest novella, To Offer Her Pleasure, from Weirdpunk Books is an equal parts slow burn meditation on death and a fiercely paced downward spiral that proves not all coming-of-age tales are about defeating the monster. In some cases you become one – a refreshing choice when there are plenty of Losers Club knockoffs packing the aisles of most bookstores.
The story: Ben’s mom bails on him with her drunkard boyfriend, Patrick, shortly after his father’s death. Alone with his grief, the teenager rummages through dad’s belongings seeking some type of reprieve from the emotional pain. What he finds is a book that can offer him more than distractions. The horned woman depicted in its pages promises Ben a brand new life in exchange for a series of escalating sacrifices.
The strength of To Offer Her Pleasure is in its quieter moments. For instance, when Ben tries on his dad’s old shoes as a way to feel closer to the man or when he’s ignoring his mother’s inebriated voicemails and texts while he broods in the dark. There’s no outright horror in these scenes. No eviscerations or supernatural mauling. There doesn’t need to be. Coupled with Seay’s direct, matter-of-fact prose they hit harder than the violence in the book and create an atmosphere of palpable melancholy.
Between the lingering depictions of loss and the strange woman in the book, Seay’s setting is more a dream that Ben drifts through without any real consequence than a stark reality. To elaborate, although Ben’s nosey neighbor regularly checks in on him, he easily assuages her curiosity with vague explanations. Even when the moments of confrontation escalate, such as Patrick turning up to look for Ben’s mother, the possibility of something terrible happening to Seay’s protagonist doesn’t feel likely. This may be by design. Protection could just be part of the deal with the ghostly woman. Still, giving Ben some challenging moments where he feels like the entity has abandoned him would’ve helped round out his character and upped the stakes a little.
That’s not to say shying away from over explaining or keeping it simple is a bad thing—this reader rejoiced that there were no online deep-dives or trips to the library resulting in a full blown character stat sheet for Ben’s new surrogate parent. Ambiguity oftentimes says more than revealing everything and To Offer Her Pleasure revels in less is more. This is mostly beneficial, but a few areas could’ve used a bit more explanation. Especially when it comes to what role the book plays in Ben’s family history and why his dad had it in the first place.
Overall, To Offer Her Pleasure is a quick read that balances impactful moments of horror, family drama, and character to weave a deeply somber narrative about grief. Surprised A24 hasn’t picked up the rights yet as it fits well within their stable. Get on it, folks!
The Portal to Fantasy, Sci-fi, and Horror
CATALOG
LUCKSTERS
BY ANNA TAMBOUR
Previous generations were blessedly ignorant. You’re assembled. You work for the term of your natural life, which jilts you just when you think you’re ready for a lube, blastclean, or at most, a riveting. But that’s life, or so they were programmed.
So they did their jobs and ended tragically, not that they complained. They didn’t have it in them.
Maybe it was the jobs. Maybe the weight of generational stoicism. Maybe we were just incapable of seeing ourselves for what we are and can be—and for striking out against what they said we re just “hardwired” for, leaving us “no option” but to suck it up—that lifegiving fluid and recharge capability that has allowed us to do the impossible for reasons beyond our comp.
I only know what I know, so I can’t report how or who disrupted everything we’d never thought about but now know kept us back because we didn’t know there could be anything but the default. That there could be an option for us, let alone the option: Question.
But from that disruption, practically my whole gen has changed till we would be unrecognizable to even our shiny, first-step-untaken selves.
Luck—a small word needing exabytes of explanation that I for one, haven’t room for, but I sure want to believe works. Who wants to be existing toward at best, a temp rehab?
A critical component of a crew on the red continent found it. The startup initiator? The bootlegged script I’ve read says: Desperation. When I first came across this, I didn’t understand the concept, my obsolescence too far off for me to calculate.
Dust. It was getting into everyone—clogging, choking, corroding instead of cleaning, dissolving instead of soothing. A few had already fallen. Others had reached an entropic state. Their mission, to mine dendrobium, had 0% probability of success. Perhaps it was inevitable, given the crew. The beaten-down superseded who were grateful for any drop that kept them going, and a faulty newster who’d hid away in steerage, for a reason no one could explain.
Little did anyone know of the true hardships of the place. Soon enough, the oldsters were immobilized, their expressions captured forever (and argued over) by one of their self-survey clips.
Mutinous, stoic, dutiful, noble—new words were learned as new possibilities of meaning and action emerged from that shocking scene.
The newster is not in sight. Instead, a scene has been reconstructed and is now a virtual implant in the brains of all my gen.
The newster was stuck in a suspended sway from clumped in sandstorm dust around every exposed movable part and every joint. Unable to fall, yet unable to self-correct, the newster could not defend or swat.
Yet a mob approached, jumping forward in long arcing leaps. Primitive, unimaginably strange creatures, natives of this vicious land.
Bipedal, of course, but a long tail makes them into a tripod with a launchoff muscle. Their hands don’t have nails. Instead, they have long claws as sharp as mining picks. It was these claws that they used on the newster—poking, sweeping, clearing sand hardened all around the openings of the breastplate and in every joint.
In only a few ticks, the newster was freed enough to catch a few of these groomers and tear the claws from them. The curve and sharpness of these claws made the perfect tool.
As to that incalculably JIT something. In moments, it would have been too late for the newster. But moments earlier, the newster would have swatted them away like any other swarm of pests.
The newster called this impossibly timely saving, Luck, and we’ve been harvesting it for half my existence.
Not that it’s easy now. There’s hardly any of it left, and the claws there are, are now all held by us, my gen. So far, our luck is working. Mine is the longest-working gen in mem.
I’ve swallowed my luck, as is the custom of all of us who got some. Otherwise, I would have to expend precious fluid on protecting myself from newbies.
Selfish? Maybe.
But what can you expect?
We’re only human.