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The experiences we have through technology is something fiction has struggled with adapting but the recent phone game Bury Me, My Love captures the rhythm and suspense involved in waiting on a text in this story about a Syrian couple as one makes her way to Germany to seek asylum.
A Mortician’s Tale asks us to examine what it means to handle the dead. Not only how a mortician handles their bodies but what the funerals we make for them mean to us and the narratives we construct with the memories we have left.
Apocalypse narratives so often focus on isolation—a person up against a wasteland or navigating groups of raiding cannibals—but what happens to the communities in these situations and what do the stories made from them show about the ebb and flow of disasters that weigh on any community.
The road trip has maybe always been considered a staple of “Americana.” The wide spaces, the hum of the engine, and quiet retrospection were thought to be essential characters to these stories. Kentucky Route Zero re-centers that notion.
The video game Tacoma is a story about an empty space station where its depths aren’t something presented but searched for—on bookshelves and in bedrooms. Sometimes stories are with the things we leave behind.
In The Solar Grid, the people on earth are screwed. A global ecological disaster. A corporate-sponsored attempt to “fix” it, and our willingness to assign the label of “third world” to a place so we can ignore it.
In the recent Marvel comic, The Vision, Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta explore the tight rope between narrative exploration and the expectations of continuity in a series about a family of superpowered robots trying to live a different kind of story.
Garland uses the detective story to place the gay experience of the era through a guided lens. The novel opens in a way you’ve heard before: a mysterious woman enters a man’s office unannounced. Only, the office isn’t a private eye’s but a bisexual psychiatrist’s, and the woman’s dead fiancé was his old lover.
The medium we present something on, often defines the kinds of stories we can tell and how we tell them. In the digital age, With Those We Love Alive shows us another way to write a story even if its written on our skin.
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