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Ahmed Saadawi's award-winning 2014 novel Frankenstein in Baghdad features a being, the 'Whatsitsname,' that is constructed of bits and pieces of individuals killed by car bombs in US-occupied 2005 Iraq. As such, the novel clearly employs the Frankenstein story as a means of commenting on the dire situation in post-invasion Iraq. Frankenstein in Baghdad thus clearly demonstrates the ongoing vitality of the Frankenstein motif in global culture, while conducting specific satirical critiques of certain phenomena in Iraq. However, despite its political seriousness, Frankenstein in Baghdad is an often playful postmodern work that shows the extent to which Iraq had been 'invaded' by Western popular culture long before the US-led 2003 military invasion. The novel makes important comments on the process of capitalist modernization and on the way in which this process ultimately leads to globalization and to the development of a global postmodernist culture., Ahmed Saadawi's award-winning 2014 Iraqi novel Frankenstein in Baghdad features a being, the 'Whatsitsname,' that is constructed of bits and pieces of individuals killed by car bombs in U.S.-occupied 2005 [...]

Horror films often feature lone individuals stranded in strange, remote locations, threatened both by mysterious, unknown forces and by the reactions of their own minds. On the other hand, Robert Eggers's The Lighthouse (2019) suggests that it might be even more terrifying to be stranded with someone else, who might be a source, less of companionship and support, than of additional threat. Moreover, The Lighthouse is a horror film in which the principal danger might not come from spectacular, supernatural monsters so much as from sheer, mind-numbing tedium, exacerbated by growing tensions between the two central characters. While this film might (or might not) involve such things as mermaids or animals inhabited by the spirits of dead sailors, it is probably ultimately best read as a film about the horror of gruelling, repetitive, menial labour performed without any hope of genuine accomplishment, reward or appreciation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brandon Cronenberg's Infinity Pool addresses issues of privilege and globalization in strikingly original ways. Part of the distinctiveness of Infinity Pool comes from the daring science fictional conceit around which it is built, and part comes from its willingness to explore extreme sex and violence in ways that tilt into body horror. In addition to collapsing the boundary between sf and horror, Infinity Pool undermines binary oppositions of all kinds, suggesting that the kind of binary thinking that defined the world system in earlier eras can no longer be maintained in an era of neoliberal capitalist globalization. Infinity Pool, though, demonstrates that the collapse of these binaries is not necessarily a good thing. Ultimately, the extreme nature of this film helps it to conduct a critique of the extreme nature of the global neoliberal system that dominates the world of the early twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Ministry for the Future (2020) is Kim Stanley Robinson's latest and most complex in a series of science-fiction novels that engage with the issue of climate change. It adds to Robinson's long engagement with the theoretical work of Fredric Jameson, though its polyphonic nature also rewards reading it through the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. The utopian dimension that is so important in Robinson's work has often led Jameson to see Robinson precisely as an exception to the cultural hegemony of postmodernism. That utopian dimension is also strong in The Ministry for the Future. Many characteristics, however, of this long, complex, highly polyphonic novel make it more appropriate to characterize it as an example of the "political form of postmodernism" that Jameson has suggested might someday come to be, challenging the death grip of the "cultural logic of late capitalism" on contemporary cultural production. While The Ministry for the Future has many of the formal characteristics typically associated with postmodernism, it uses these characteristics not just to outline the problems posed by climate change and economic injustice but also to suggest ways in which ordinary people--working together on a global scale--can confront these problems and make a better world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl (2009) is set in twenty-third-century Thailand, in a world in which climate change and the depletion of the oil supply have led to a collapse of the global economic system. Disease and famine are rampant. And yet, in this seemingly postapocalyptic world, there are numerous signs of hope. This text, in fact, contains strong utopian energies, driven partly by the motif of genetic engineering, which suggest the possibility of rebuilding the world in a way that overcomes many of the limitations of the past in terms of the politics of race, gender, and class, but also in terms of more enlightened attitudes toward the relationship between humans and the natural world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]