The Sinking Dream of Living under the Sea
By Tamara Wilhite
Hanna-Barbera released a cartoon in the 1970s called Sealab 2020. It imagined a world where scientists and technical experts studied ocean life, protect the environment and go on adventures. Undersea mining and oil drilling are shown in this future.
Skip forward a few decades, and SeaQuest DSV shows an even grander future under-the-sea. There are cities on the ocean floor under domes and in connected habitats, partially there due to population pressure. Floating sea farming platforms, undersea mining and research are all part of this world.
That potential future hasn’t quite come to pass. The whole thing is similar to the grand vision of flying on hoverboards a la Back to the Future deteriorating into an argument on what constitutes a hoverboard.
Akron Beacon Journal Reviews Fred Tribuzzo’s Pulse of the Goddess
By Liberty Island Links & Excerpts
Barbara McIntyre writes, “‘The world’s temporarily over,’ says Cricket Hastings, the main character in Ravenna author Fred Tribuzzo’s American Blackout series. In the first book, ‘Pulse of the Goddess,’ there has been a solar storm followed by a nuclear explosion over Kansas, and an electromagnetic pulse has wiped out all modern technology.”
Check out the First Chapter from The Undergraduate
A New Novel from Liberty Island chronicles the Millennial college experience
By Scott Lloyd
Pick up your copy of The Undergraduate: A Novel by E. Scott Lloyd. And enjoy the opening chapter here.
New Fiction: Seizing Infinity
By Tom Cosentino
Henry Watterson half-listened to the television on in the other room so that he wouldn’t feel completely alone as he stared out the window and watched the traffic on Genesee Street. He wasn’t paying attention to anything in particular, he never did these days. This had been his distracted routine since the funeral.
He heard the person on the television say something that snapped his head around. A man with a sophisticated English accent had just made a statement that jarred Henry out of his chair and made him run to the screen. He grabbed the remote and backed up the program to hear it again.
“It has been theorized that a black hole contains all time.”
He hit rewind again to hear it for a third time.
The Marriage of The Mundane and the Fantastic
Deconstructing Canadian Culture, Part 10: Southern Ontario Gothic
By Josh Lieblein
We have gone from city to country, and from silly to serious, but there is one place we haven’t looked, and it is within, and below, into the unconscious. Today we venture into “Southern Ontario Gothic,” that sub-genre of Canadian culture that hints at the mystical and the magical.
Let us begin by introducing two of the form’s most accomplished practitioners: Robertson Davies, the Canadian Faulkner, and Timothy Findley, who is perhaps the Canadian Edgar Allan Poe. Though Findley invented the term “Southern Ontario Gothic,” it was Davies who turned the region into a self-contained world like that of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, while Findley would write from the perspectives of Noah and his sons before the Flood, or Carl Gustav Jung on the eve of World War I.
PreTeena: December 31, 2018 – January 6, 2019
Sunday Comics!
By Allison Barrows
You won’t want to miss these hilarious cartoons depicting the ups and downs of adolescence. Now each week’s strips will debut on Sundays as the lead strip of Liberty Island’s Sunday Comics feature. If you draw a comic and would like to have your work featured on Sundays, please contact us: [email protected] Check out Allison Barrows’ new PreTeena blog here.
3 Sweet Sunset Shots from Saturday, December 29, 2018
By David M. Swindle
*Submit your photographs of nature and the outdoor life to [email protected] to participate in this weekly feature exploring the natural world.*
Check Out These Liberty Island Titles!
By Liberty Island Staff
We offer everything from genre thrillers to literary novels to satires, memoir, and cultural commentary. Something for everyone!
The first title from Liberty Island this year is Tom Cosentino’s hilarious and heartwarming comedic literary novel The Art of Looking for Trouble. It was released on June 23 and is now available for purchase. The paperback edition is now available too. Release dates for our upcoming titles will also be announced shortly along with the opportunity to pre-order. Thank you for your support!
The War of the Ice Age Apocalypse Movies
By Tamara Wilhite
Back before we rebranded global warming into climate change, we were afraid the world was cooling. Actually, in the 1970s, it was cooling, bringing on fears of a global ice age. This wasn’t addressed nearly as much in Cold War movies as fear of nuclear wars; many movies actually featured worlds that arose in the aftermath of such destruction, though it might have included a nuclear winter in there. What you don’t see, though, are many movies set in a future ice age.
After watching “Snowpiercer”, I tried finding similar movies and stumbled upon “Quintet”. These two movies are almost as far apart as possible, though they end up in the same, dismal place.
Making Gotham Great Again, Part 2: Law and Order
Considering Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns as a Mirror to Today’s Politics
By Shant Eghian
In an interview with Comic Book Confidential in 1988, Frank Miller remarked that 1980s America was a “very frightening, silly place… it’s often silly and frightening at the same time and [he] hope[d] [The Dark Knight Returns] is silly and frightening at the same time.”
Editor’s Note: Click here for Part 1 of this ongoing series. Warning: spoilers in this and the previous installment.
You do not have to read very far in The Dark Knight Returns to realize that Miller can indeed illicit horror and laughs on the same page, if not in the same panel. Miller’s genius at combining these two seemingly contradictory responses lead to some intriguing commentary on criminality and society’s response to it. And like Miller’s satirical attacks on the media, his observations on modern America’s inability to seriously deal with crime make interesting parallels with the Trump era.
