iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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J.A. Killingsound @kislingconnection.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

The Third Age of Middle Earth is followed by what the Valar called the "Attitude Era."

alex @alexcj.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Shout out to M. John Harrison, author of the Viriconium series, beloved by true speculative fiction ball-knowers. I haven’t read it yet myself, and his stuff is extremely hard to find at used book stores, but I’ve managed to pick up a couple of his books and am always on the lookout for more.

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alex @alexcj.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Finished a re-read of Canticle for Leibowitz over the weekend as I’m getting caught up on shelved by genre. Great book, but not a shock i didn’t get it as a teenager given its pessimism. This time I was enchanted by how funny it is and the way it balances an empathy for humanity with a deep nihilism

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alex @alexcj.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

What was the best original SF anthology of 1972? Probably Again, Dangerous Visions! But I wrote a blog post about Universe 2 and New Dimensions II instead as they slug it out for second best.

thehinterlands.blog

Universe 2 vs. New Dimensions II

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alex @alexcj.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Heinlein talk is interesting and frustrating as always. He’s still inescapable all these decades later. Delany called him “the enemy of good speculative fiction” in the early 70s which was pretty controversial at the time. Now he mostly gets brought up to complain about people recommending him.

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Wallace Polsom @wallacepolsom.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Eight issues of PLANET STORIES with cover art by Allen Anderson (1908-1995).

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Harris Foster @harris.zone · 08/09/2026

what zelda will look like in 2026

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alex @alexcj.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

The USA has been amalgamated into the GTA. We are going to run the 401 through the white house.

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alex @alexcj.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

New blog post! Stalling for time as I work on a bigger project by showing off some book covers from my collection.

thehinterlands.blog

Cover Art Showcase 1

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alex @alexcj.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

After @ckunzelman.bsky.social described his deep dive into the archives of SF literary correspondence on shelved by genre, I was very jealous. So excited to see this piece drop! I’ve spent the last year neck deep in SF of this era so this was a must read. Highly recommended.

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alex @alexcj.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

It took a month but I have overcome my malaise and written a blog post. Some notes on the background and inspirations of the stories in Hinterlands Annual #1.

thehinterlands.blog

Hinterlands Annual #1 Release and Notes

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Patrick Monahan @pattymo.com · 14/08/2025

This is a masterpiece. Simply excellent www.instagram.com/reel/DMVGMIC...

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Narumy Natsue @narumynatsue.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

I tried to draw it in the style of Naoki Urasawa sensei!

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alex @alexcj.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

It’s just 2001 in new york city, except the internet is like a weird VR thing i think? Based on Bleeding Edge i’m pretty sure everything Thomas Pynchon knows about the internet came from cyberpunk novels. Also there’s a tv channel that only shows increasingly funny fake biopics

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alex @alexcj.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

One thing the odyssey has made clear to me is a large number of people have Christopher Nolan Derangement Syndrome.

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cmrn knzlmn @ckunzelman.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

eagerly awaiting the day they make a science fiction film so i can write a review of it and really get into the weeds about my literature of choice

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alex @alexcj.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

I think it’s a little disingenuous to suggest negative responses to Wilson’s review mean that “people today can’t handle real criticism” or what have you. People are responding!

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alex @alexcj.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

For all the “don’t make the torment nexus” stuff we really did make the palantir with social media and especially twitter. A seeing stone which in theory should give you an overview of all things, but which a malicious will controls, showing you only that which will drive you to despair and madness

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alex @alexcj.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

A lot of people seem to think that a work of art being a masterful and sublime experience and also having hamfisted and goofy dialogue is a contradiction of some kind. These people have never experienced the work of Hideo Kojima

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alex @alexcj.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

I’ve seen a few people know try to dismiss the odyssey by claiming it is “equivalent to the MCU” and I find it just baffling. The critique of the MCU was that they are sloppily filmed, authored by producers rather than artists, and undermine their own themes by refusing to take themselves seriously

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gita “the formalist” jackson @xoxogossipgita.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

You kind of can’t just be like ”yeah and there were some visuals there that were quite a spectacle.” A movie is made up of visual information. The entire movie is visuals. You have to talk about the images on the screen!

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alex @alexcj.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

I do think people from writing backgrounds often make the error of engaging with movies as though the image is noise you need to translate back into words. The image is the movie. I had to teach myself this as an adult. If you aren’t engaging with the images you aren’t engaging with the movie

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alex @alexcj.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Also! The Hinterlands Annual 2026 is now available digitally! Very proud of this, even though I think my writing still has a long way to go.

thehinterlands.itch.io

The Hinterlands Annual #1 by Alex Johnston

The first Hinterlands Annual, a collection of short horror fiction

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alex @alexcj.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

New blog post! Quick thoughts on some great books and comics that I'm considering into my "canon". Kind of a mid-year overview, a companion to a youtube video I'll have coming out in a couple of weeks.

thehinterlands.blog

Canon Class of 2027 Preview

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Leo @infrabeige.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Book of the New Sun retold by dril

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michael lutz @ztul.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

What I will say about Dungeon Crawler Carl is that I have not read it and will not read it and if you like it godspeed but nothing I've ever heard about it has surprised me in any way because I feel like I actually already have read it but as a webcomic in 2005

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alex @alexcj.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

I was considering whether to formally review Dungeon Crawler Carl on my blog, but thank god Alice Bell has already done a much better job of picking it apart than I could. The book sucks!

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alex @alexcj.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

I graphed the hugo and nebula nominees by where they were originally published, which for some reason I thought would be less work than writing a normal blog post. Oops!

thehinterlands.blog

Fun with Graphs

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alex @alexcj.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

A second youtube video! Finally! Discussing some great short fiction collections I read earlier this year.

youtu.be

Three Great Sci-fi/Fantasy Short Story Collections

YouTube video by The Hinterlands Blog

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Chariot Rider @chariotrider.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

Since the spring of 2023, I have been creating a non-violent art museum in Doom. My goal was to find art that engaged with the themes that informed Doom's creation, while also exploring the possibilities of virtual museum spaces. Please enjoy this museum. Download link below

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Sam Barlow 🔥 @mrsambarlow.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Good reminder that remakes often dilute or smoosh the qualities that made the originals sing, even if the broad picture seems intact or even prettier

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alex @alexcj.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

New blog! Read and then wrote about the nominees for best short story at the hugos and nebulas in 1973. Why? What do you mean, Why????

thehinterlands.blog

Award Nominated Short Stories of 1973

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alex @alexcj.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

A side effect of loving Invisible Cities is I’ve come to be lukewarm at best on anything else that riffs on or tries to capture its tone. Telling a series thematically connected fantastical short stories and your name aint Italo Calvino? Not on my watch buddy

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alex @alexcj.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

Pyre is the best Supergiant game from a gameplay, character, narrative, and overall perspective

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Andymonium @andymonium.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

The day I don't go to bat that this is Supergiant's true magnum opus just assume that I am dead

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Paris Marx @parismarx.com · 02/07/2026

we must accept more extreme weather and more deadly natural disasters to achieve a few tenths of a percentage point of additional gdp growth in the short term 🥰

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alex @alexcj.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Best first time watches, June - One Sings, the Other Doesn't (1977) - I Love Boosters (2026) - The Proposition (2005) - Basic Instinct (1992) - The Cell (2000)

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alex @alexcj.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Watching the beginning of ghost in the shell 2 in awe: “in the future, cyborg vision will allow us to know if someone’s had their head blown off”

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alex @alexcj.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

If the plot of anything involves people living on the corpse of a dead god, you have my attention

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alex @alexcj.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

new blog post - went long about the huge SF anthology I spent the first half of the year reading. I have a lot more to say about it but I need to do a lot more reading before I can really pull apart exactly what that is. So have this for now where I recommend some stories.

thehinterlands.blog

The Big Book of Science Fiction: An Overview+

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Paris Marx @parismarx.com · 19/06/2026

Governments are chasing AI investment, even as their publics turn against the technology and the data centers that power it. Canada’s Mark Carney has chosen a shameless approach: to cast the opposition as a lack of “literacy” as he sets out to (re)educate Canadians about the benefits of AI.

disconnect.blog

AI opposition isn’t the product of a lack of “literacy”

The many problems with Mark Carney’s AI strategy for Canadians

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alex @alexcj.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Forced to ring my “Asteroid City was a masterpiece” bell again because I have witnessed yet another bad Wes Anderson opinion on the timeline

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alex @alexcj.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Do i think all societal problems would be fixed if all people were forced to watch Andrei Tarkovsky movies regularly and they weren’t allowed to look at their phones at all the whole time? No. Probably half. I think half of our problems would be solved by that

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Samantha Mackenzie Greer @sammgreer.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

whenever I see someone say a remake 'fixed' the original, I just get sad. videogames almost exclusively have such a hostile relationship with their past. classics are simultaneously beloved and loathed, never met with curiosity but resentment that they're not pre-packaged into modern convention.

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