Master of the Game is the kind of trashy supermarket checkout line novel that is stuffed with awful members of the uber-rich doing terrible things to one another and hatching elaborate revenge schemes because, what else do they have to do all day?
Although one certainly cannot dismiss the impact of World War II on the United States, it’s an order of magnitude more shocking to witness the devastation wrought across Europe. For all our suffering, we could come home to a country that remained largely untouched by large-scale conflict. Those in Europe, however, were already home.
On The Cultural Gutter, Kungfu-Powered Afrocyberpunk Pulp is a look at Steven Barnes’ 1983 novel Streetlethal, which is sort of cyberpunk meets Mack Bolan starring Luke Cage in a story about magic orgy mushrooms.
A double agent operating in London dreams of retiring, but his life is complicated when he is assigned to assassinate a traitor: himself. With one foot in the pop art fantasy of James Bond and another in the grim world of John Le Carre, A Dandy in Aspic never quite succeeds at being either.
On the Cultural Gutter, we’re going on a tour of the universe via The Cosmic Crooner, all about Frank Sinatra’s bizarre Trilogy, a third of which is devoted to a swingin’ tour of the future.
On Cultural Gutter, I’m Neuromancin’ with Myself. The early 1990s was when I read Neuromancer. Into this maelstrom of personal evolution and conflicting feelings came Billy Idol’s Cyberpunk.
In the whole of Ireland, there’s only one working distillery open to the public (Bushmills is technically in another country): the Teeling Distillery. In The Spirit of Dublin, I sit down with distillery co-founder Stephen Teeling to discuss his family history, the state of Irish whiskey, and the complicated process of building a distillery that is open tot he public in a country that has no guidelines for such a thing.
