Nick Lowe
10 Quotations from Nick Lowe
| anime n. | 2000 Mutant Popcorn in Interzone (#160) Oct. 31/2 It sets out to forge a distinctively American dialect of anime, harnessing the Japanese genre’s visual style and narrative grandeur to an idiolectic cluster of native Hollywood themes; and even where it fails utterly, as it largely does, it exposes fascinating faultlines between cultures and genres. |
| Betelgeusean adj. | 1984 So You Fancy Yourself as a Writer? in Focus (#9) Gastronomy. Of various ideas we tried out to do with inventing alien cultures and societies, this proved to be much the easiest and most fun. All you have to do is describe the alien dish named, again rather after the manner of Call My Bluff: Betelgeusian squop-nuts, Altairian flatties, blue snoop, great hyperspatial whistling dipple, &c. |
| cyborg v. | 1994 Mutant Popcorn in Interzone (#87) Sept. 24/1 (review of RoboCop 3) Large fantasy movies in the 1990s are cyborged into an expensive suit of merchandising spin-offs; the film is merely the expendable fragment of live tissue that animates the whole apparatus and keeps it moving. |
| gameplay n. | 1999 Mutant Popcorn in Interzone (#145) July 43/2 The eXistenZ game, supposedly a world-beater, looks like the world’s least enjoyable game ever: no action, little gameplay, no narrative propulsion, lots of confusing and pointless twists, easy clues, [etc.]. |
| mecha n. 1 | 1995 Mutant Popcorn in Interzone (#100) Oct. 36/2 Quite possibly the most critic-proof movie ever made, Power Rangers marks a fascinating new phase in the Japanese colonization of the western imagination—a radical postwestern narrativity and design sense alike, born of the combined subversive powers of toy manufacturers, classical mecha action, and the tastes and aspirations of the under-tens. |
| replicant n. 1 | 2000 Mutant Popcorn in Interzone (#161) Nov. 42/1 Like replicants for androids, the deathkiss word ‘superhero’ is avoided altogether for the techy euphemism ‘mutant,’ even though the one thing that all the homines superiores seem to have in common is really dumb comiesy superpowers that could only have been invented by a Marvel bullpensman on a bad caffeine high: controlling weather, doing ice sculptures, projecting something called ‘optic blasts’ (which have given generations of writers migraines of their own trying to rationalize). |
| saucerman n. | 1997 Mutant Popcorn in Interzone (#121) July 34/1 Yearning for that holiday on Mars, but can’t afford the memory implants? Longing for the abductee experience, but tired of waiting for the saucermen to call? |
| superhero n. | 2000 Mutant Popcorn in Interzone (#161) Nov. 41/1 The moment you allow the superheroes the kind of freedom of association that they take for granted in a mainstream comics universe, all hell pops loose. |
| timeline n. | 2000 Mutant Popcorn in Interzone (#161) Nov. 41/2 In the film, the School has expanded into an institutional embodiment of the X-universe itself: an enormous Hogwarts for trainee superheroes, through which different team members from different generations pass in their own private timelines, all scrambled up so that Storm (for example) has already graduated while Iceman is still frozen in senior year. |
| Uranian adj. | 1989 Mutant Popcorn in Interzone (#28) Mar.–Apr. 27/1 The woefully misappreciated Uranian project to create a zany comic sculpture from their planet’s magnetic field. |