Annihilation Is a Thrilling, Terrifying Surrealist Trip

Something strange is happening in science fiction. Mutating flowers. People with eels for intestines. Crocodile-shark hybrids, part-plant deer, and moaning skull-faced boar-bears. (Oh my.) Such are the flora and fauna of what's now being called, rather neatly, the New Weird, the genre's version of the grotesque—though it's only "new" in the sense that it's finally…

By EveAim March 20, 2019 Off

The Internet Defines 'Covfefe'

Leave it to Donald Trump to keep Twitter guessing. Just after midnight Eastern this morning, the president did what the president often does at odd hours: He sent out a tweet. But this one, rather than attacking a political opponent or offering up a 140-character policy position, just plain made no sense: "Despite the constant…

By EveAim March 20, 2019 Off

Battlefield V Finds Grandeur in WWII, 64 Players at a Time

Leaping from planes, we fall through aurora that looks as though it’s melting into the sky. We drifting for a few quiet moments above the tundra, descending with the snow. What we can’t truly grasp until we land, though, is that we are gently gliding into hell. A series of dramatic vignettes ensues, touching half…

By EveAim March 20, 2019 Off

The Handmaid's Tale Reinvented Dystopia

In anticipation of Sunday's Emmy Awards, this week WIRED staffers are looking back at some of their favorite shows from the past year. The Handmaid’s Tale couldn’t have come to Hulu at a better—or worse—time. The adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel started production in 2016, when it looked like the United States was on…

By EveAim March 20, 2019 Off

Westworld's Creators Know Why Sci-Fi Is So Dystopian

The first season of Westworld wasted no time in going from “hey cool, robots!” to “well, that was bleak.” Death, destruction, android torture—it’s all been there from the pilot onward. Then again, on a show about a theme park staffed with sentient robots—sorry, “hosts”—those outcomes are exactly what audiences have come to expect. If science…

By EveAim March 20, 2019 Off

A Campus Murder Tests Facebook Clicks as Evidence of Hate

Click:dog cake topper 4 inch Investigators say they still don't know why Sean Urbanski, a 22-year-old University of Maryland student, walked up to 23-year-old Richard Collins III, a US Army lieutenant just days shy of college graduation, and fatally stabbed him at a campus bus stop this weekend. What they do say they know is…

By EveAim March 20, 2019 Off

Tacoma Is a Compelling Game, But It Can’t Top Gone Home

The space station Tacoma is full of phantoms. Fragments of conversations, traces of casual strolls. The ephemera of life somehow given shape. See, the Tacoma's inhabitants are recorded constantly, their biometric data and every moment of their daily lives catalogued and stored by the station's on-board AI, ODIN. That data ostensibly belongs to Venturis, the…

By EveAim March 20, 2019 Off