Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media Club Club Club Club. Hello, and welcome
Speaker 1: to cooles On Media book Club, the only book club
Speaker 1: where you don't have to do the reading because I
Speaker 1: do it for you and I know what you're thinking.
Speaker 1: You're thinking, how has this been a proper book club
Speaker 1: when you do the reading but then there's no discussion. Well,
Speaker 1: this week we're going to have a discussion, and we
Speaker 1: have on not only the author, Alan Lee of the
Speaker 1: book that you just listened to, her Medica, but also
Speaker 1: Hazel who helps a lot with book club, and so
Speaker 1: that way it's an actual conversation between a bunch of people.
Speaker 1: How are you Alan?
Speaker 2: While the star with Alan, I don't know, I'm here, Yeah,
Speaker 2: and a variety of complex and enough ble ways.
Speaker 3: I love this for you, Hi, I'm also feeling complex
Speaker 3: and enough ofble. That was an incredible description. I had
Speaker 3: a little smoothie for breakfast. I got up early. I'm
Speaker 3: so proud of myself.
Speaker 1: We are here at the crack of ten am to
Speaker 1: record for you Eastern time. Eastern time. That's how much
Speaker 1: we all love you. So there's a book it's called Hermtica.
Speaker 1: We just listened to it. Well, you all just listened
Speaker 1: to it. Well, yeah or whatever, and we want to
Speaker 1: talk about it. Hey, soe, what do you got?
Speaker 3: Yeah, let's start off with just where the book came from.
Speaker 3: Can you tell us a little bit about where you
Speaker 3: found inspiration for this and maybe where you typically find
Speaker 3: inspiration for your fiction.
Speaker 2: Well, every writing process is different. I did the vast
Speaker 2: majority of the writing for her Medica in a very
Speaker 2: frenzied month early in the COVID pandemic. So the feelings
Speaker 2: of lockdown one may have shown up a little bit
Speaker 2: in the claustrophobia of the work. Maybe, I mean probably
Speaker 2: not context is real, but no, it definitely is real,
Speaker 2: and so that was a part of it, while also
Speaker 2: thinking about evolving technologies of social control and surveillance. Far
Speaker 2: more than the pandemic, I would say social media actually
Speaker 2: really shows up in this book, the compartmentalizing, siloed effect
Speaker 2: of social media, how it allows people's reality to be controlled,
Speaker 2: how it really really limits and cuts down on people's
Speaker 2: social interactions while giving them the illusion of having more
Speaker 2: social interactions, when in fact these interactions could be you know,
Speaker 2: it could be AI, it could be robots on the
Speaker 2: other end of things, and in any case, it's not tactile.
Speaker 2: It's not you know, olfactory, like you're so rarely actually
Speaker 2: in the room with people or walking down the street
Speaker 2: with people. And then of course always and connected to that,
Speaker 2: a lot of thinking about different options that the state
Speaker 2: may have for responding to the ecological crisis, to responding
Speaker 2: to you know, these building pressures that may lead towards collapse,
Speaker 2: and what different forms of totalitarianism might look like today.
Speaker 1: Is it frustrating to have been prescient so fast about
Speaker 1: the AI thing? Where Like, because I think in twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one, it was less likely that the people
Speaker 1: that you would be arguing with on the internet were
Speaker 1: literally not people, right, But these days more and more,
Speaker 1: if you're arguing with someone on the internet, there's like
Speaker 1: a really good chance or just straight up arguing with
Speaker 1: a cell phone somewhere that is like running a program.
Speaker 2: Personally, as an anarchist, I feel like that's a part
Speaker 2: of our lot, is being like incredibly frustrated with Like
Speaker 2: it's not like an ego thing. It's not like anna
Speaker 2: I told you thing. It's like seeing people that you
Speaker 2: care about jump joyfully onto a sledge and go full
Speaker 2: speed down a snowy hill. Right into like a trash compactor,
Speaker 2: and at the beginning you're like, there's a trash compactor
Speaker 2: right there, and you have to watch this whole beautiful
Speaker 2: descent and then just the horror of all the blood
Speaker 2: and gore flying, and then do that over and over
Speaker 2: again every year, every century. I think sometimes I wake
Speaker 2: up with like, I don't know, Emma Goldman or Alexander Berkman,
Speaker 2: like screaming through my mouth, things that like should have
Speaker 2: been obvious at the end of the nineteenth century, and
Speaker 2: you know, we just keep diving headfirst into it, but
Speaker 2: somehow we're surviving this trash compactor world. So yeah, it
Speaker 2: can be frustrating and it can also be inspiring on
Speaker 2: some dark levels that like you know, we're still here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, it's heavy, We're still here.
Speaker 2: Give us another one. Let's go through the master again.
Speaker 1: Yeah, back onto the sled, motherfuckers.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Alan, you're somebody who I came across first through
Speaker 3: like nonfiction, particularly like How to Live in the trash
Speaker 3: Compactor World that I am. I remember you had in
Speaker 3: me of this book, and I went, oh, my friend,
Speaker 3: my friend writes fiction too. I'm wondering if you could
Speaker 3: talk about like I know that fiction is important to
Speaker 3: you in your personal life, and I'm wondering specifically if
Speaker 3: you could talk about your relationship with fiction and how
Speaker 3: the fiction that you write compliments your nonfiction work.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so it's not really secret anymore. But I also
Speaker 2: write a lot of nonfiction under another name, which you
Speaker 2: know you might be able to find out any smooths
Speaker 2: out there.
Speaker 1: Or we've been saying it at the top and bottom
Speaker 1: of every episode that people should check out your books.
Speaker 1: We got permission from you to do this. I want
Speaker 1: to be really clear.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, no, I know, yeah, absolutely, But how about
Speaker 2: we don't say that name at all during this whole
Speaker 2: interview and then we'll force our sloths out there in
Speaker 2: case any of them haven't to listen to the Okay book. Yeah, well,
Speaker 2: lo bar lobar for sleuthing these days, Like, I mean,
Speaker 2: all of the big mysteries are obvious. Yes it is genocide. Yes,
Speaker 2: we're heading towards billions of deaths and matflex Lincs like
Speaker 2: they don't even have to hide it anymore. Yeah, from
Speaker 2: early on, I had a lot more luck getting the
Speaker 2: nonfiction published. Some of it is luck, some of it
Speaker 2: is also that the fiction world is way more, especially
Speaker 2: speculative fiction is way more monopolized or kind of concentrated
Speaker 2: into like five massive evil corporations. They control such a
Speaker 2: larger share of the speculative fiction that is published than
Speaker 2: in the nonfiction world, where you have a lot more
Speaker 2: independent presses that have managed to hold on, and that
Speaker 2: might be starting to change again for the better as
Speaker 2: far as fiction is concerned. But it can be really
Speaker 2: difficult to get fiction published. So even though I might
Speaker 2: like my nonfiction writing is definitely way more widespread. I've
Speaker 2: been writing fiction since I was a little kid, both
Speaker 2: as a form of survival and a form of pure
Speaker 2: unmitigated joy. When I was a teeny little kid, I
Speaker 2: would just kind of walk back and forth in the
Speaker 2: woods or you know, if I was stuck in the
Speaker 2: half us, like in a house, just kind of imagining
Speaker 2: different worlds and stories and whatnot. And also, like as
Speaker 2: one becomes more and more aware of like the world
Speaker 2: around them, I don't want to take like a utilitarian
Speaker 2: approach either to nonfiction or to fiction. I think they
Speaker 2: both can and should be acts of joy, of desperation,
Speaker 2: of rage, of curiosity. But they're both, you know, tools
Speaker 2: for understanding the world around us for interacting with the
Speaker 2: world around us. And basically, the real world can't exist
Speaker 2: without the imaginary world. And that's true on a mathematical level.
Speaker 2: That's also true on the level of like how societies
Speaker 2: organize themselves, like we need imagination, and imagination can also
Speaker 2: really allow us to better understand or change the world
Speaker 2: that we live in.
Speaker 1: But if that were true, then Marx's pure materialism might
Speaker 1: not be fully correct. And so I actually think you
Speaker 1: must be wrong because Marx said that everything is material.
Speaker 2: I'm probably wrong. And yeah, and though I do prefer
Speaker 2: cash money like it seems like money, I don't know,
Speaker 2: it's almost as though money were not that material.
Speaker 1: Trying to say that social constructs are real.
Speaker 3: I do think this is one of the great gifts
Speaker 3: of anarchism, though, is that, like a lot of our
Speaker 3: great anarchists are like also fiction writers, you know, like
Speaker 3: Ursula kayle Wynn was predominantly a fiction writer. I think
Speaker 3: this is like a thing that's really special at the
Speaker 3: anarchist tradition is that we are so interwoven in with
Speaker 3: fiction and with imagination, and along with exploring how big
Speaker 3: themes show up in our actual lives, also exploring how
Speaker 3: things could be different or how things could be worse.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that we kind of like missed a period.
Speaker 1: When I first started writing fiction or like reading about
Speaker 1: anarchist fiction, I was like, oh, where is it? And
Speaker 1: I had trouble finding it a while ago, And that's
Speaker 1: changed completely. And then yeah, if I look back historically,
Speaker 1: there is so much fiction in the anarchist movement and
Speaker 1: like the left and you know whatever more broadly, and
Speaker 1: it just kind of it stopped being the thing that
Speaker 1: people were focused on for a little while. And focus
Speaker 1: on is the wrong word, right, I don't think we
Speaker 1: should all like writing novels isn't the way the way
Speaker 1: that we change the world, right, It's like one of
Speaker 1: the ways that we influence the world and also survive
Speaker 1: inside the trash compactor.
Speaker 3: But Margaret, you know how else we survive inside the
Speaker 3: trash compactory influence the world?
Speaker 1: Is it the fact that our podcast is sponsored by
Speaker 1: goods and services that people can rely on for every
Speaker 1: single need they have, and we can rely on for
Speaker 1: modest income.
Speaker 3: I do like a modest income, and I do love
Speaker 3: the fact that I hate capitalism, with the strong exception
Speaker 3: of anything that is plugged on this podcast.
Speaker 1: That's right, here's all the stuff we personally love that
Speaker 1: we have absolutely no control over because it's just ads,
Speaker 1: and we're back.
Speaker 2: I personally love to shower with that product that was
Speaker 2: just advertised.
Speaker 3: Oh, especially the Internet mattresses. You love to shower with
Speaker 3: those Internet mattresses. Well.
Speaker 1: The best part is that there's like a whole series
Speaker 1: of categories of ads that we have completely banned, but
Speaker 1: sometimes they slip in anyway. And the most famous example
Speaker 1: of this is that a couple of years ago, school
Speaker 1: Zone Media had some ads for joining the Washington State
Speaker 1: Highway Patrol. Oh God, And then I was listening once
Speaker 1: and I got an ad for become a jailer.
Speaker 2: Oh jeez, I.
Speaker 3: Got an ad once for become a jailer in Ohio specifically.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think I was driving through Ohio when that
Speaker 1: happened to me. So if you're listening to Ohio, sorry, yeah,
Speaker 1: don't do that as an exception anyway. So I want
Speaker 1: to fuss at you about this book. I really liked
Speaker 1: this book. I just read it for the second time
Speaker 1: to a bunch of people. And there's a point near
Speaker 1: the end of this book days is in job search,
Speaker 1: jail and in job search jail days is like thinking through, well,
Speaker 1: what if I go study moss but then work with
Speaker 1: people to step outside the system. And you know, if
Speaker 1: this was a neat simple narrative, this is what would happen. Right,
Speaker 1: And I recognize that everyone has different ways of responding
Speaker 1: to things, but that's what I would do, right, And
Speaker 1: I think that there's this interesting thing. Right, you're presenting
Speaker 1: this like very grand metaphor, and I think in the
Speaker 1: classic science fiction way you're presenting this grand metaphor for
Speaker 1: how you know all of our choices are illusory? Right,
Speaker 1: I don't know how to pronounce that word, but it
Speaker 1: turns out illusionary isn't a word, And I'm really annoyed
Speaker 1: by that, because illusionary should be the word, because it
Speaker 1: makes more sense than illusory illusory.
Speaker 2: I think illusory job as a pronounce like brings out illusions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, that makes more sense. I have this problem
Speaker 1: where I read more than I talk, which is impressive
Speaker 1: because I talk for a living. But you have these
Speaker 1: illusionary choices. I'm going to try and make this fucking make.
Speaker 2: We're allowed to make worse. Every word was made by
Speaker 2: a person, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Whoa until the future and when they're all made by
Speaker 1: robots and then we're shot if we use the wrong ones.
Speaker 1: In this job search metaphor jail basically saying that, like
Speaker 1: all choices that we make are totally illusionary, and you know,
Speaker 1: illusion of freedom, right, and there is no outside. The
Speaker 1: system is one of the main things in this metaphorical world, right,
Speaker 1: But all three of us are currently alive, and all
Speaker 1: three of us perceive ourselves as doing a complicated navigation
Speaker 1: with a system to kind of live outside and to
Speaker 1: try to open up the concept of an outside. So
Speaker 1: in my mind, the metaphor of this book and the
Speaker 1: actions that the character is choosing work within the context
Speaker 1: of this metaphor and not within the real world that
Speaker 1: it's representing. I don't have a question here. I'm just
Speaker 1: trying to challenge you about this part.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so first referring really strictly to the story, and
Speaker 2: then to get theoretical if I'm may after that. I
Speaker 2: don't see the book as a strict metaphor. Obviously there's
Speaker 2: a lot of metaphor in it. Like I also intend
Speaker 2: it to be like a world that works, a world
Speaker 2: that might be our world someday hopefully not, but might
Speaker 2: be in addition to a reflection on the world that
Speaker 2: we currently inhabit. I think Days makes the choice that
Speaker 2: makes the most sense for them. Days is a little
Speaker 2: bit crazy. Days is not like everyone else in terms
Speaker 2: of how like emotionally and psychologically they relate with the
Speaker 2: rest of the world. And instead of them being cast
Speaker 2: as neurodivergent, which in my humble opinion is just like
Speaker 2: a stupid, like literal synonym for abnormal, their craziness actually
Speaker 2: gives them strengths that other people don't have. It also
Speaker 2: deprives them of, like some of the resources of like
Speaker 2: stronger human connection, where they could just soldier on, you know,
Speaker 2: through the lies. They could soldier on through that prison
Speaker 2: world and keep surviving. So dying or possibly dying suicide
Speaker 2: for them is a choice. I mean there's also a
Speaker 2: great sadness to it, like Days also like an habit's
Speaker 2: like a very sad world. They can't really survive in
Speaker 2: a prison once they realize that it's a prison. And
Speaker 2: that's the reality for a lot of us, you know,
Speaker 2: in this world, in the real world, like there is
Speaker 2: always an outside, there are almost always other choices until
Speaker 2: we end up in maximum security prison. In maximum security prison.
Speaker 2: I mean, your choices are you know, basically eat or
Speaker 2: or don't eat, like try to kill yourself or try
Speaker 2: to survive because of like the extreme level of physical constraint.
Speaker 2: But like you know, outside of prison, in in you know,
Speaker 2: the rest of the world, a lot of us end
Speaker 2: up taking our own lives as like a response to
Speaker 2: like prison society, and that's what Days does. I did
Speaker 2: bring in a couple other characters to reflect that there
Speaker 2: were other choices, but yeah, I just I guess I
Speaker 2: feel like that that was kind of where you know,
Speaker 2: this character would end up based on who they are.
Speaker 1: No, it makes sense, and like it does make sense
Speaker 1: as the end of the story. I just have this
Speaker 1: like I think it was that reading the like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: this other story would be like this, and I'm like, ah,
Speaker 1: that's the one I would pick, right, But I also
Speaker 1: do think it's kind of worth reflecting on. Not that
Speaker 1: people can only write about their own experiences, but the
Speaker 1: first time I met you, you handed me a book
Speaker 1: of short stories that you had written in prison. I
Speaker 1: can see how the experience of having like absolutely no
Speaker 1: control might have influenced Like, I think a lot of
Speaker 1: people would write this as like a raw thought experiment.
Speaker 1: They're like, oh, what if I was in job search prison,
Speaker 1: but you've been in well, I think it wasn't job
Speaker 1: search prison that you were in, But I don't know,
Speaker 1: how does this relate?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was in real prison, different security levels from
Speaker 2: maximum security to minimum security. That definitely relates. I mean,
Speaker 2: that definitely marked an influenced to me as a person.
Speaker 2: And at the same time, one of the most remarkable
Speaker 2: things about it was when I went in, there was
Speaker 2: nothing new about the experience. There was nothing that didn't
Speaker 2: remind me about the psychiatric ward one time in high
Speaker 2: school when I was hospitalized, or high school itself, or
Speaker 2: all of these other institutions. Like, we really do live
Speaker 2: in a prison society. That's not just a hyperbolic metaphor.
Speaker 2: And so like I mean, being in like an actual
Speaker 2: prison definitely like changes you and influences you. But also
Speaker 2: it's not an other reality, it's not exceptional. It's so
Speaker 2: similar to all the other institutions that make up our society.
Speaker 2: And that kind of also brings us to this question
Speaker 2: of like the outside of like you know, what's you know,
Speaker 2: what's potentially outside of all of this, Like I think
Speaker 2: a lot of radical academics will construct these really beautiful theories,
Speaker 2: these little air tight theories almost you know, air tight,
Speaker 2: like you know, certain buildings we might have just recently referred.
Speaker 1: To hermetically sealed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, these hermetically sealed theories exactly, thank you. And I
Speaker 2: think one of the problems with that is, in a
Speaker 2: very kind of unconsciously colonial Western way, they're confusing influence
Speaker 2: with unfreedom. There's nowhere on the planet that is not
Speaker 2: influenced by capitalism in the state, Like we can find
Speaker 2: like you know, plastic trash at like the bottom of
Speaker 2: the deepest trench in the Pacific Ocean. But influence is
Speaker 2: not unfreedom. Influence is actually freedom. Freedom is not like
Speaker 2: you know, I am an island, a sovereign island that
Speaker 2: you know is unencroached by other islands. It's that we
Speaker 2: are all influencing each other, but without like you know,
Speaker 2: undue pressure or constraint from like one of the beings
Speaker 2: or one of the forces within this overall network. And
Speaker 2: so on the one hand, like it's really important to
Speaker 2: recognize that the states in iaginary, the state's model, the
Speaker 2: state's goal and their practice is to make sure that
Speaker 2: there is never any outside, that there is never any
Speaker 2: real independence or freedom from it, And at the same time,
Speaker 2: the state always fails in that goal that there has
Speaker 2: always been an outside. Sometimes the outside is right under
Speaker 2: the state's nose. Sometimes it's in the borderlands. Sometimes it's
Speaker 2: in the crossing of borders. Sometimes it's in the legible spaces.
Speaker 2: Sometimes it's in huge rebellions, and sometimes it's in the
Speaker 2: choice that a single prisoner has, with no other friends nearby,
Speaker 2: with no other connections, to stop eating, to stop going
Speaker 2: along with it. And choice is a really important part
Speaker 2: of control. Domination works a lot better if they give
Speaker 2: us choices, if they give us elections, But there are
Speaker 2: always going to be more choices than the ones that
Speaker 2: we're presented with.
Speaker 1: I like that. I think that that is the kind
Speaker 1: of core of Harmonica, is the staring at the six
Speaker 1: choices on the board, you know, being like, oh, you
Speaker 1: can choose to wear the I don't know, Chay Gavara
Speaker 1: shirt and become a like, you know, state sanctioned radical
Speaker 1: or whatever. I don't know where I'm going with that.
Speaker 1: Someone save me, you.
Speaker 3: Know what six choices this podcast offers you. So sorry,
Speaker 3: This is like I was encountering this while we were
Speaker 3: like going through the script of the book, I was like,
Speaker 3: I need to put an ad pivot in here, but
Speaker 3: this is really heavy, and I feel really good pivoting
Speaker 3: to ads, but we all also need to get paid.
Speaker 3: And I am deeply, deeply grateful in my gend deflection
Speaker 3: for the sponsors. You make your own choices about whether
Speaker 3: you listen to them.
Speaker 1: I want everyone to understand how deeply we think about
Speaker 1: these ad pivots, and see the inside baseball of how
Speaker 1: we think about these ad pivots and how they keep
Speaker 1: us awake at night to make the perfect ad pivot.
Speaker 2: Yes, readers, listeners, if I make we just all reach
Speaker 2: through the ether, cross the internet, the physical distance that
Speaker 2: separates us, hold hands and genuflect to our sponsors.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 2: Thank you for that word, Hazel.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you welcome, And here they are ads and we're back.
Speaker 1: I for one am glad we found our new God,
Speaker 1: whatever the last sponsor was. I feel bad for all
Speaker 1: the people who got the other advertisers, because they're not
Speaker 1: our new God. It's only the last other people are
Speaker 1: so doomed. Who Yeah, it's really just a lottery.
Speaker 3: At least they're not following any of the other many
Speaker 3: products and services that aren't advertised on the show that
Speaker 3: are shortly.
Speaker 1: About to become because they're not on the show, or
Speaker 1: because we live in a fascist seal state and everything's
Speaker 1: illegal now.
Speaker 3: Who knows. Let's talk about genre space instead. Okay, Yeah, Alan,
Speaker 3: I want to chat about genre space. This is a
Speaker 3: book to me that really reads like something from like
Speaker 3: a classic Golden Age of sci fi novella. It's got
Speaker 3: this like really sweeping metaphor that's not one to one.
Speaker 3: It's aiming towards like bigger sociological themes. There's like whole
Speaker 3: socratic asides about gender, and I guess like it's something
Speaker 3: that I don't encounter very often anymore, And it was
Speaker 3: really fun to read something that felt to me like,
Speaker 3: what if we took kind of the tone and the
Speaker 3: theme of something like Braving New World or nineteen eighty four,
Speaker 3: something that like I really grew up in middle school on,
Speaker 3: and then gave it a fresh like modern anarchist, anti
Speaker 3: authoritarian twist. I don't know, I guess I'm curious, like,
Speaker 3: you know, could you tell us a little bit more
Speaker 3: about what was interesting to you about that tone and
Speaker 3: like how you came to that as the tropes and
Speaker 3: the frameworks that you were going to work with in.
Speaker 2: I love that you that you bring that out because
Speaker 2: like for me, that was like maybe this might seem
Speaker 2: odd like almost like unconscious or like invisible to me,
Speaker 2: because it's just kind of like I described this earlier
Speaker 2: as like a very feverish writing process, so like I
Speaker 2: was like so in it that I could barely see it.
Speaker 2: And really some of the big influential works for me
Speaker 2: growing up, and you know, maybe also like in my twenties,
Speaker 2: let's see, I think you mentioned Kurt Vonnegut, like you know,
Speaker 2: that definitely figures also a lot of you know, the
Speaker 2: major works of magical realism, whether it's like Gabotie America's
Speaker 2: one hundred Years of Solitude or like Bulgako, Smaster and Margarita.
Speaker 3: I'll also say, like the Truman Show, Like this book
Speaker 3: feels in a lot of ways like a reverse Truman Show.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 1: The sky is real, so the sky is fake?
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Getting even older, like before nineteen eighty four,
Speaker 2: there's this lesser known novel by You've gain Zematin, we
Speaker 2: early Soviet novel where you know, one of the people
Speaker 2: to speak out around like this socialist revolution that was
Speaker 2: quickly turning into a healthscape was a science fiction writer,
Speaker 2: and he wrote something that was certainly a huge influence
Speaker 2: on Orwell and is also you know, very much about
Speaker 2: a surveillance society. I think a lot of those older
Speaker 2: works were a much greater influence on me than a
Speaker 2: lot of newer speculative fiction. Which is not to say
Speaker 2: that the newer speculative fiction isn't there. I think there
Speaker 2: have been some really amazing works coming out lately. There's
Speaker 2: also been a lot of really mediocre stuff that gets huge, huge,
Speaker 2: huge platforms. But the great stuff I think still really
Speaker 2: has to generally like pass this filter, which is designed
Speaker 2: more for the marketing of books. It's designed more for
Speaker 2: the limitations of editors and agents that are looking at
Speaker 2: you know, hundreds of manuscripts or pitches a day, and
Speaker 2: so really like the way that, like if we differentiated
Speaker 2: between a tool and a machine, we have more choice.
Speaker 2: With a tool, we have more craft. With a tool,
Speaker 2: we can use it to amplify our abilities, to amplify
Speaker 2: our effect, whereas a machine we just become adjuncts to
Speaker 2: the machine. We have to feed material into the machine
Speaker 2: following parameters set by the machine. And I'd actually love
Speaker 2: to hear more from you, Margaret about your experiences with
Speaker 2: both like larger publishers and independent publishers. But yeah, I
Speaker 2: think for me that's been I guess I've sort of
Speaker 2: resisted some of the generic rules that have kind of
Speaker 2: come up in the last like ten or twenty years
Speaker 2: that are really set by the industry slash machine, and
Speaker 2: I think I've kind of immersed myself more in, you know,
Speaker 2: looking back to other works of speculative fiction from you know,
Speaker 2: decades and decades ago.
Speaker 1: I do have a different take on the way that
Speaker 1: publishing is working right now. I actually think that the
Speaker 1: publishing world does not shy away from radical content. It
Speaker 1: is that there's specific asks in genre around form. And
Speaker 1: this has been true, I think forever, because genre fiction
Speaker 1: literally by being genre fiction, has a certain commercial aspect
Speaker 1: to it and a certain like popular fiction aspect to it,
Speaker 1: which I actually think is one of its more interesting advantages, right.
Speaker 1: I think it reaches more people than literature often, and
Speaker 1: so yes, there is like kind of like lowest common
Speaker 1: denominator stuff, and like the Marvel movies or things like
Speaker 1: that right, But I actually think that the genre fiction
Speaker 1: world right now is like alive with radicalism. And I
Speaker 1: think that even at the major publishers, most of the
Speaker 1: individual editors who are making these decisions are themselves very
Speaker 1: radical or at least progressive, and tend to be progressive
Speaker 1: who are open to radical ideas. This has been my experience.
Speaker 1: I remember writing a short story about people using drones
Speaker 1: to kill CEOs and how that was fine. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I remember being like, no one will ever touch this,
Speaker 1: and Strange Horizons published it and did a good job
Speaker 1: with it, and it was reasonably well received. But I
Speaker 1: think that there are absolutely genre restrictions that change over time,
Speaker 1: and you kind of have to play within them about
Speaker 1: ways of describing characters and ways that plots work, and
Speaker 1: like who the interiority is with and things like that
Speaker 1: that are like larger social conventions of form. But I
Speaker 1: do think that it is interesting and good to be
Speaker 1: able to just also sometimes be like, but that's not
Speaker 1: what this book is. I don't fucking care, you know.
Speaker 1: And my other aside is it just to be really
Speaker 1: nerdy about anarchist fiction. You mentioned Vonnegut, you mentioned Huxley
Speaker 1: and or Well and Vonnegut was a pacifist anarchist. Very explicitly,
Speaker 1: Huxley was an anarchist. Huxley specifically said in the introduction
Speaker 1: to I Think Island, his utopian novel that I have
Speaker 1: read since I as a teenager, he says, what the
Speaker 1: world needs is decentralization of a krapotkinisk nature. And so
Speaker 1: what he's saying is what the world is needed is anarchism,
Speaker 1: you know, and referencing Peter Krepakin, And of course Orwell
Speaker 1: is a very complicated figure, but was certainly willing to
Speaker 1: throw grenades at fascists and get shot through the neck
Speaker 1: for that process. And so I will forgive a lot
Speaker 1: of decisions that he made based on that. And he
Speaker 1: also specifically said, if I had gone to Spain to
Speaker 1: fight again, I would have gone with the anarchists, if
Speaker 1: I had known what I knew going into it, you know.
Speaker 1: Instead he fought with a anti state Marxist militia, the
Speaker 1: POM or whatever. More complicated than that. See the entire
Speaker 1: first year of cool people who did cool stuff for
Speaker 1: me talking about the Spanish Civil War and also my
Speaker 1: episode about Orwell. But I think it's interesting that a
Speaker 1: lot of the people that we will reference as these
Speaker 1: sort of like grand figures of science fiction and like
Speaker 1: speculative concepts, and even to throw one that I'm like
Speaker 1: always sort of afraid to throw in clockwork Orange Man.
Speaker 1: Anthony Burgess was also an anarchist, and you know, obviously
Speaker 1: the movie of that is a very interesting, complicated edge
Speaker 1: lord piece of fiction that is trying to explain a
Speaker 1: social idea. And I am not really even trying to
Speaker 1: say anything about that right now, but I think that's
Speaker 1: interesting that it's coming from people who have this very
Speaker 1: specific set of critiques where they believe in both socialism
Speaker 1: and freedom, you know, where they believe we should take
Speaker 1: care of each other but also like be in charge
Speaker 1: of ourselves and that the state shouldn't be this massive
Speaker 1: domineering force. And so it's like really interesting to me
Speaker 1: that the Golden Age, I don't know if golden Age
Speaker 1: is the right word, but all of these like classic
Speaker 1: works of dystopia and stuff, we're written by people who
Speaker 1: have this set of values.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Publishing currently, they're kind of capturing and publishing
Speaker 2: like a huge number of books of you know, new stories.
Speaker 2: And on the one hand, you know they're doing this
Speaker 2: in like a pretty harmful marketplace of ideas sort of
Speaker 2: way where they're like algorithmically from the first day. And
Speaker 2: so this is important for any you know, any new
Speaker 2: authors out there, like get all of your friends, get
Speaker 2: everyone you can to like help you boost your book
Speaker 2: before it even you know, hits the shelves because oh yeah,
Speaker 2: with pre orders, pre orders, you know, campaigns buzz like
Speaker 2: you know whatever, because like algorithms do so much of
Speaker 2: the decision making. Now about like a major publisher, they're
Speaker 2: not just you know, publishing like a dozen books here,
Speaker 2: they're publishing hundreds or thousands. And what they're doing is
Speaker 2: they're scooping up intellectual property, right, so they get a
Speaker 2: big cut. They may even be mediocre renditions of a
Speaker 2: story they get scooped up by Hollywood and turned into
Speaker 2: like a blockbuster film that there's like a whole bunch
Speaker 2: of money in. And otherwise they're basically just from like
Speaker 2: day one, up voting or downvoting a book. And so
Speaker 2: they might be publishing like thousands of titles with the
Speaker 2: hopes that they get one or two best sellers out
Speaker 2: of it, and so all of those other books they
Speaker 2: get published, this author feels like you they had this
Speaker 2: amazing experience of like, hey, my stories gotten out there,
Speaker 2: and really it's kind of buried in an intellectual property vault.
Speaker 2: So on the one hand, you know, we have this
Speaker 2: like really damaging marketplace of ideas. But on the other hand,
Speaker 2: it does also really mean that the publishing industry is open,
Speaker 2: just like you said, like a huge diversity of different
Speaker 2: kinds of stories, to radical stories, to people who just
Speaker 2: because of their gender or the color of their skin,
Speaker 2: you know, might have been barred from like a chance
Speaker 2: of publishing speculative fiction in the not so distant past.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that brings us into like a nice outro.
Speaker 3: I wanted to end on just asking y'all what you've
Speaker 3: been reading recently, anything you've been enjoying, anything you would recommend.
Speaker 2: Well, let's see, I have definitely been keeping up on
Speaker 2: what Arcati Martin has been writing. That's the author of
Speaker 2: A Memory called Empire. Also m Mieco Candon, Hillary Mantell's
Speaker 2: historical fiction series A Mirror in the Lights. I'm currently
Speaker 2: the last one in that trilogy. And then you know,
Speaker 2: I always, you know, go back to some old classics. Lately,
Speaker 2: I've been finding a lot of soulace in Calvin and Hobbes,
Speaker 2: which is I think just some of the best metafiction
Speaker 2: that's ever been written.
Speaker 1: One of the first zines that was ever handed when
Speaker 1: I became an anarchist was like a big oversized zine
Speaker 1: that was like eight and a half by eleven, stapled
Speaker 1: in the corner, and it was Calvin and Hobbes as anarchist.
Speaker 1: And they didn't change any of the words in any
Speaker 1: of the Calvin and Hobbes comics. I remember that they
Speaker 1: just like organized them by like critiques of society, critiques
Speaker 1: of school, critiques of work.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, so good.
Speaker 1: I finished reading a book that is coming out soon
Speaker 1: by Carter Keen. It's called Morsel, and it's a horror
Speaker 1: novella that's really good, and I don't know has good
Speaker 1: like radical politics woven throughout a story about an ancient monster.
Speaker 1: I really liked that, Hazel, you read anything good.
Speaker 3: I have mostly been reading things that are like cozy
Speaker 3: and gentle, which is not quite the vibe of the
Speaker 3: things that you both were plugging. But I've really enjoyed
Speaker 3: A Song for the Wild Belt by Becky Chambers, which
Speaker 3: is a novella about a tea monk who has a
Speaker 3: like steampunk ass bicycle powered little tea cart that they
Speaker 3: ride around, and then they meet this robot who like
Speaker 3: helps them go on a journey, and it's it's very sweet.
Speaker 3: It's about burnout and reconnecting with nature and regrowing part
Speaker 3: of your soul. I also really enjoyed A Witch's Guide
Speaker 3: to Magical Innkeeping by sangu Mandana, which is about a
Speaker 3: witch who runs an inn and is trying to get
Speaker 3: her magic back and has a lot about disability, grief
Speaker 3: and also burnout and found family and what magic really is.
Speaker 3: So that I've been enjoying. If you want something a
Speaker 3: little bit more edgy, I did also recently reread The
Speaker 3: Word for World as Forest by Ursula Kulin, which is
Speaker 3: a really good novella about It's like Ursula's perspectives on
Speaker 3: kind of the Vietnam War and also generally on colonialism
Speaker 3: and exploitation. Yeah, it's good. It's violent in a cathartic way.
Speaker 3: It's revolt. So what Star Wars ripped off it is
Speaker 3: what Star Wars ripped off Alatar.
Speaker 1: Well, so Star Wars rips it off because and Or
Speaker 1: is the name of the like city that the creatures
Speaker 1: that are totally not Ewoks are based out of.
Speaker 3: They also are human, like it's important that they are.
Speaker 3: They are kind of described as like short teddy bird people,
Speaker 3: but they are genetically also human.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that just the like, I don't know.
Speaker 1: As soon as I realized that their town was called
Speaker 1: and Or, I was like, this is just literally what
Speaker 1: the Ewoks are based off. This is just the word
Speaker 1: for worlds. Forest is my favorite Star Wars film as
Speaker 1: a kid. Anyway, anyone got anything to plug here at Alan?
Speaker 1: You got anything you've been writing?
Speaker 2: Well? Actually so, I, like I said at the beginning,
Speaker 2: I've been writing fiction forever. I have just manuscripts and
Speaker 2: manuscripts that are waiting publication, and I might be getting
Speaker 2: some good news. There's a really strong possibility that in
Speaker 2: the next year or two you will see on the
Speaker 2: shelves at the independent bookstore near you and certainly not Amazon,
Speaker 2: the first in a trilogy called Mad Hatter. So yeah,
Speaker 2: we're just waiting for an official announcement, but this is
Speaker 2: a pre official announcement that yeah, my next sci fi book,
Speaker 2: Mad Hatter, should be getting published.
Speaker 1: Okay, all right, Well that's it for Cool Zone Media
Speaker 1: Book Club this week. And next week we'll bring you
Speaker 1: more stories.
Speaker 3: Yay.
Speaker 1: Thanks, thanks y'all,