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Orit Gat
Orit Gat is a writer living in London. She is a contributing editor of The White Review.


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On Marriage, Netflix, and Other Things I Hate

Book Review

June 2023

Orit Gat

Book Review

June 2023

1. ‘It’s kind of crazy to shop at Target, watch Netflix, drive a Honda, and still have a husband.’   Marriage falls into a...

Book Review

July 2022

It’s Personal: Writing and Reading Through Grief

Orit Gat

Book Review

July 2022

1. A spill  I’m drinking coffee in bed and reading The Reactor. I feel so close to everything Nick...

For almost the entirety of man’s recorded 50,000-year history the moon has been unattainable Alternately a heavenly body, the resting place of the gods, or a divine being itself, the moon’s earliest meanings for humanity were ultimately spiritual, if not purely sacred, largely because it was unattainable and the distance insurmountable: an enchanted, mysterious object The basic facts of the moon’s physical reality inform the fundamental structure of its role in both fiction and history A barren canvas, whose symbolic and ontological weight for humanity far outstrips its practical import (currently), the moon is frequently implicated in a complex reflection of earthbound power relations or cast as a mirror in which humanity apprehends its uglier truths   Viewing the moon as a political and commercial entity in the science fiction era allows us to trace a complicated web of interrelated meanings The Apollo programme of recent history, ostensibly about space exploration, represented a meeting of political, technological and ontological paradigms which created a global media spectacle Assumed to be the herald of a new age, the motives and cost of the Apollo programme have since been questioned The human impulse to travel to the moon was often couched in the edifying rhetoric of progression and nobility by the American government of the 1960s, but treatment of the subject in fiction and film both before and after the landings is typically and overtly marked by a deep-seated ambiguity surrounding the motives for exploring and/or colonising the moon, and often focus instead on the human cost associated with such grand imperatives   In H G Wells’s First Men in the Moon (1901), Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962) and Stanislaw Lem’s Peace on Earth (1987), the moon is deeply entangled in complex political agendas In H G Wells’s novel the two central protagonists embody blind, scientific instrumentalism on the one hand, and scheming, bloody, blundering capitalism on the other (These twin figures, used to critique imperialism by Wells, can incidentally be found in more recent science fiction such as James Cameron’s Avatar (2009)) Lem’s novel presents a satire of the Cold War from

Contributor

August 2014

Orit Gat

Contributor

August 2014

Orit Gat is a writer living in London. She is a contributing editor of The White Review.

Essay

September 2020

Three Finals

Orit Gat

Essay

September 2020

1998   In the summer of 2006, at a bar off Odéon, a girl I didn’t know drew a...

Anna Wiener’s ‘Uncanny Valley’

Book Review

February 2020

Orit Gat

Book Review

February 2020

1. SF vs NY   Anna Wiener found herself in the right place at the right time. That is, if that was what she...
James Bridle’s ‘New Dark Age’

Book Review

October 2018

Orit Gat

Book Review

October 2018

Halfway through James Bridle’s foreboding, at times terrifying, but ultimately motivating account of our technological present, he recounts a scene from a magazine article...
Women and Technology: History is a Cautionary Tale

Book Review

April 2018

Orit Gat

Book Review

April 2018

Few book reviews open with amateur rap, but: ‘back in the day when new media was new,’ goes the first line of a song...
Scroll, Skim, Stare

feature

Issue No. 16

Orit Gat

feature

Issue No. 16

1.   This is an essay about contemporary art that includes no examples. It includes no examples because its subject – artists’ websites, their...
What Can an Art Magazine Be?

feature

Issue No. 10

Orit Gat

feature

Issue No. 10

What can an art magazine be? Today, as the publishing industry reassesses its role in the age of the internet, the pioneering art magazine Metronome provides...

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poetry

April 2014

MUEUM

SJ Fowler

poetry

April 2014

Since I have worked at the mueum I have published, and I have written 486 pems. I have seen...

Interview

August 2013

Interview with Marvin Gaye Chetwynd

Ben Eastham

Interview

August 2013

Four or so years ago, at what was then the single Peckham establishment to serve a selection of sandwiches...

fiction

April 2014

Submission for the Journal of Improbable Interventions

Brenda Parker

fiction

April 2014

Abstract Preparations for experimental work must be conducted without interruption to ensure experimental success. In this work, the impact...

 

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