Adam Rowe

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Genre movies

This email also features the phrase "Replicants are like Impossible Burgers but alive"

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How Michael Whelan's art wound up in Louis Vuitton ads

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The 2020 State of Sci-Fi

Plus a definitive answer to why '50s comics were obsessed with gorillas

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Dadu Shin, Image Quality, and Wizards

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Image of the Week: The Hildebrandt Brothers

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Image of the Week: Arthur Suydam

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Book Review: The Art of Richard Powers

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I'm writing a book

and you're all invited to look over my virtual shoulder

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All the research on '60-'80s science fiction art you never knew you needed

Welcome to Retro Sci-Fi Art by me, Adam Rowe. Writer, 70s sci-fi fan Sign up now so you don’t miss the first issue. Subscribe now In the meantime, tell your friends!

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The Writing Process

Maddd Science I'm wrapping up 2020 with a hodge podge. The eponymous writing tips are mostly just from this first article, with the rest of my links here covering stuff as random as the next cool TV drama or a 80s Reader's Digest compendium. Hey, it&

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Pulp Beacons

Maddd Science I dashed off the phrase "pulp beacon" as the idea for an email topic like six months ago, so I forget if I read it anywhere or came up with it myself, but it's a pretty good summation of my favorite thing: A nonfiction

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Alternate Reality

Maddd Science Writing a 100% perfect alternate reality story is, in my opinion, impossible. There are too many miniscule factors involved in building your own functioning universe, and you would need god-tier knowledge of every vocation and industry in order to account for everything. I mean, you can write a

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The Book Business

Maddd Science Good read here about how the razor-thin margins in the bookstore business have led to the rise of the book-lover-as-indentity trend over the past decade. It's honestly more optimistic than my own take on what has made books so big as a marker of one'

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Reboots That Won't Happen Because They'd Actually Be Good

Maddd Science The concept of a reboot has a Catch-22 built right into it, and no, I'm not talking about the Catch-22 reboot that I'm sure is coming at some point. Reboots only happen because of the name recognition of the original, and the original typically

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Crime Tropes

Maddd Science Okay, when I picked this theme, I had one article and figured I'd dig up some more. Sadly I was way too busy the past two weeks, and basically just have a few crime-themed articles followed by my usual link hodgepodge. You know what they say,

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Why Indiana Jones Works

Maddd Science Fun fact: My Indiana Jones newsletter remains to this day the one that lost me the most subscribers (check it out! Maybe I'll lose you too). Without any data, I can only assume it may have been because I spent the whole newsletter explaining that everyone&

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Sylvie and Bruno

Maddd Science Poetry aside, Lewis Carroll's only fiction works besides the two Alice in Wonderland books were his two Sylvie and Bruno books, published several decades later. You may not have heard of them. This is because they are bad. A lot of jokes in Alice in Wonderland

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Women in Sci-Fi History

Maddd Science As most of you know, I run an art blog dedicated to 70s-era sci-fi art. I've posted over 23,000 pieces since 2013. And 70s-era sci-fi artists, based off that data, were mostly men. I can list the women I know off the top of my

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Nuclear Apocalypses

Maddd Science Nuclear apocalypses: So near, yet so far so good. I actually never used to enjoy apocalypse narratives because I've found them too depressing, but I think paying attention to the news over the past few years has really warmed me up to enjoying the fictional version

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Us

Maddd Science Like Get Out, Us is the type of movie that you can peel layers away from for a long time. Unlike Get Out, you can also peel as many layers away from the theme itself without quite figuring it out. Either way, as long as Peele keeps including

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Gen Z and Existentialism

Maddd Science This newsletter, I'm breaking out of my focus on genre and stories to get extra thinkpiecey: I have a theory about the driving cultural norms for future generations. It's an idea I've been idly kicking around for a while. Here's

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My list of articles to read AFTER watching Endgame

Maddd Science Short email this time... Just a bunch of links to articles on Endgame, mostly, and then I'm outta here. Since I'm bringing up Marvel in this one, here's this article on how film and TV are both merging into "content,"

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Lovecraft in Pop Culture

Maddd Science HP Lovecraft: Creepy, groundbreaking, trailblazer of weird horror, famously racist. It's pretty tough to avoid focusing on that last descriptor. I'd argue that the right move is to glean the best stuff from his work (I love how he can set a skin-crawling mood

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70s-era Bigfoot

Maddd Science Bigfoot was at its height in the 1970s. It was the coolest decade to be a Bigfoot fan, following the release of the 1967 Patterson hoax film (you know, the blurry one of a Bigfoot pausing mid-stride to glance at the camera to her right with one of

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Dunking on Holmes

Maddd Science Sherlock Holmes is the world's most famous fictional character, and the act of satirizing, spoofing, parodying, and generally mocking him has a long and storied tradition. His first parody was released just four months after the very first Sherlock story saw the light of day, and