Deluge

Around the midpoint of The Deluge, a character laments how quickly “you wake up and you’re in a bad movie from the future”. It’s an offhand but accurate description of the economic, ecological and technological turmoil in Stephen Markley’s bleak vision of the coming decades. In his alternative 2030s, surveillance capitalism has ended privacy and AI has eroded human agency; financial markets collapse and the political sphere becomes yet more rabid. Above it all looms our inescapable, spiralling climate…

One of the most prestigious publishers of science fiction short stories has closed itself to submissions after a deluge of AI-generated pitches overwhelmed its editorial team.Clarkesworld, which has published writers including Jeff VanderMeer, Yoon Ha Lee and Catherynne Valente, is one of the few paying publishers to accept open submissions for short stories from new writers.But that promise brought it to the attention of influencers promoting “get rich quick” schemes using AI, according to founding editor Neil Clarke.In…

Photo: Justin Sullivan (Getty Images)This story was originally published by Grist. You can subscribe to its weekly newsletter here.It was the year 2028, and I was hiding with eco-terrorists in a cabin deep in the woods. We were trying to avoid detection by the surveillance state, which was tracking activists after attacks on oil and gas infrastructure. Birds were dropping dead from the sky, and a dust storm raged around us, turning the sun crimson.I was relieved to wake up from this dream and shake my paranoia that the…

We may be in the age of superheroes in the world of cinema, but we’d be remiss to ignore the fact that we’re also waist-deep in remake culture. Indeed, Disney in particular seems to have taken a liking to cashing in on beloved IPs from years ago, such as The Lion King, Dumbo, and the upcoming The Little Mermaid. Competing with the Mouse House for the reboot crown is the horror genre, which seems to clutch its more tried-and-true IPs close to the chest just, as much as it is willing to let people like Jordan Peele and Ari…

With the DC universe increasingly mired in controversy, even as James Gunn’s brand-new era beckons, the Marvel franchise must be looking an even more inviting place for Hollywood’s finest than it did before. Hence why so many DC stars are being linked with the MCU right now. Elsewhere on today’s agenda, Deadpool 3 could pick up the one element the internet liked about Thor: Love and Thunder as a Secret Invasion theory has Nick Fury fans fearful. Amid rumors of Ben Affleck swapping DC for Marvel, fans find a way for Will…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeDwayne Johnson has hit out at Black Adam’s critics in a post celebrating the film’s commercial success.The film, in which Johnson play the DC antihero, was mauled by reviewers in the week before the film’s release on Friday (21 October).Consequently, Black Adam has a 41 per cent critic score on review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, which at the time of writing was based on 209…

Image via Getty Images/Frazer Harrison/Marvel Comics Well, there you have it, people. This Saturday saw Marvel make their much-ballyhooed presentation at the D23 Expo, delivering a host of first-look trailers, casting updates, and other announcements about what we’ve got coming across the end of Phase Four and Phase Five. You’d expect MCU lovers to be bowled over by everything that’s just come our way, but actually there’s a lot of dissent in the ranks over what we didn’t get at D23. Secret Invasion and Werewolf…

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: Sources: Apple about to embark on one of the most ambitious periods of new products in its history, with the deluge coming between the fall of 2022 and H1 2023 — Apple's latest software from WWDC sets the stage for a busy fall 2022 and first half of 2023. Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: Sources: Apple about to embark on one of the most ambitious periods of new products in its history, with the deluge coming between the fall of 2022 and H1 2023 — Apple's latest…

We've been watching GPU prices fall since the start of the year, but the past few weeks suggest things could get a lot worse — for the graphics card manufacturers and GPU vendors, that is — in the near future.GPU prices dropped 15% in May, and we've seen similar 10–15% drops each month for the past several months. We saw the best graphics cards come back into stock (at retail) as GPU mining profitability has plummeted — and that was before Bitcoin and Ethereum crashed again, dropping Bitcoin from around $30,000 to the…