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Transit Lounge

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'Transit Lounge' collects together in one volume the meat of essays from the much lamented and sadly missed publications 21.C and World Art.

Featured are insightful essays by Greil Marcus, Darren Tofts, McKenzie Wark, Mark Dery, Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling, R.U. Sirius, and many others. 'Transit Lounge' also features commentary from J.G. Ballard and an introduction by cyberpunk author William Gibson.

Unlike other publications of the 'Information Age', 21.C under the strong editorship of Ashley Crawford and Ray Edgar managed to steer clear of the excesses and frequent hyperbole that has accompanied the explosive growth of the Internet and 'Third Wave' corporations. The articles in 'Transit Lounge' read like mini research reports from the future, critical in tone, well-crafted, and notably have conscience, and sometimes even dissent.

Some of the many highlights include Bruce Sterling on 'Industrial Memory'; Mark Dery's insightful interviews with Mark Davis and Andrew Ross and distillation of the film 'Crash'; McKenzie Wark on the rise of N.W.O. culture and its paranoid Black Helicopter emblems; analysis of the 'military-entertainment' complex (Wark); and profiles of the late Kathy Acker, Noam Chomsky, Sadie Plant, Survival Research Laboratories, Stelarc, Hans Moravec, Nicholas Negroponte, Philip K. Dick, David Cronenberg, the Extropians, J.G. Ballard, and Frank Tippler, amongst others.

'Transit Lounge' stands apart from the wealth of by now trendy cyber-crit anthologies by drawing upon the critical voices of diverse specialists and analysts, painting a broad but detailed mosaic of 21st Century culture.