Monolith

Last year I wrote a series of articles for the online and print magazine Monolith. I posted links to the articles on this blog as and when they appeared. The brainchild of writer Lore Oxford, Monolith currently operates an excellent tumblr site that features a visual archive of heavy sci-fi, cosmic psychedelia and fringe science. The great strength of the magazine was its ability to weave together the late 70s mood of Heavy Metal and Omni with a contemporary focus on current science, parapsychology and high strangeness. Monolith successfully channelled the atmosphere of late-counterculture, futurology and artistic experimentation that characterised Dune, Alien, Dark Star and is evident in current hauntological works like Beyond the Black Rainbow. This cosmic, air-brush aspect of neo-psychedelia is superficially well known but is still in need of a comprehensive mapping. Along with magazines like Arthur, Monolith made great strides towards the charting of this territory. I hope it reconfigures again in the future.

The following posts feature most of the articles I contributed to the magazine. I’ve already posted a text on telepathy that originally appeared on the Monolith site. The others cover Steve Quenell, in-vitro meat, and Area 51.