Audio scifi, the Chesapeake Bay, and real revolutions!

we can be in this world and create other ones too!

This weekend was depressing as hell! We’re surrounded by media normalizing genocide, Gestapo-style raids targeting immigrants, and the brutal effects of ecocide.

The worst thing and the easiest thing we can do is to fall into despair, passivity, and isolation. But guess what? We don’t have to!

We can’t be watching horrible news all the time without dying inside. We need to support our storytellers and embrace storytelling not as a form of distraction or escapism, but as a fugitive strategy, a way to avoid getting trapped in a reality that is built by the institutions that thrive on misery. Speculative fiction in particular helps develop a radical imaginary — our collective ability to imagine other worlds. And I truly believe we can’t fully perceive our own world or cultivate a healthier one without strong imaginations.

And I have exciting news on that front: the marvelous Margaret Killjoy is reading my debut novella, Hermetica, over at the Cool Zone Media book club. Two episodes are out already, and they’re dropping every Sunday!

Here’s episode I:

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-cool-people-who-did-cool-96003360/episode/czm-book-club-hermetica-by-alan-288400598/

(Pretty sure it’s also on Apple and other podcast sites, if anyone wants to post links in the comments.)

Guess what? Fiction publishing is even more monopolized than nonfiction publishing. I’ve been writing speculative fiction for longer than I’ve been writing nonfiction, but I’ve only been able to get one novella published. Thanks to our prolific, proactive, skillful movements, we have a lot of independent publishers for radical analysis and history, but they aren’t able to publish much fiction. There are a couple of independent speculative fiction publishers left, but the vast majority of fiction is published by 5 huge corporations, literally called The Big 5.

The Big 5 publish by algorithm, meaning they decide in the most inhuman way possible what kinds of stories get published, not based on quality but on market predictions. They actually publish a large number of books, but already based on pre-order sales, they put their immense resources behind a couple titles at a time, artificially creating bestsellers. They bury everything else in their Intellectual Property vault for its potential value in case any Hollywood producers want to buy the rights to interesting storylines.

So… just in case you want to help out a struggling writer, you could drop a friendly note to, say, PM Press, and tell them you’d love to read more fiction by your favorite multigenre anarchist writer with an unpronounceable last name who is letting Leo season permit him some bombastic self-promotion… and who writes fiction under the pen name Alan Lea. (Me!!!) And you can check out their other great books on their website!

It would also mean a lot if you shared the podcast or this newsletter with friends and family. (Psst: radical fiction is also a great way to help people get past the ideological barriers that make them insist anarchism is impractical, even when all the data and so much history is on our side!)

What’s that you say? Anarchy works? In fact, it does, and Detritus Books has just printed another print run with a beautiful cover! Around a hundred examples from the last three thousand years, right up to the 21st century, at a small scale or large dimensions that span continents; in cities, rural towns, and forests; in specific projects or immense networks; in revolutions, in disasters, and in quieter moments when we can focus on everyday life: anarchy works!

Finally, I got a new article published with Prism Reports, “Colonialism and extractivism catch up with the North Atlantic’s greatest estuary.”

The Chesapeake Bay is a really important place for marine and avian life across the North Atlantic. Millions of birds migrate, winter, or live there year round. Hundreds of millions of fish and shellfish spawn in its immense, shallow estuary and wetlands. Countless forest, field, marshy, and mountainous habitats make up its 64,000 sq. mile watershed, which is also a home for over 18 million humans.

It’s also an important place to me: the most stable home I’ve ever had was my grandparents house, which was right on the water in the rural Northern Neck. My peepaw taught me how to fish and crab, and why it was important to always throw back anything we caught if it was below a certain size so it could grow, thrive, reproduce, and keep the ecosystem healthy. Together we repaired an osprey nest blown over in a storm, and for years afterwards the osprey came back to raise their chicks on that little platform over the water. My mammaw taught me how to cook grits, she treasured my imagination and weirdness as a little kid, and she made it very clear I would never beat her at Spite & Malice, but I could still have fun trying.

She’s still alive, pushing a century, but we lost the house. With waterfront gentrification boosting property values, the whole family couldn’t afford to keep it. And even if we had, rising storm surges would probably have destroyed it within the next few decades. This ongoing climate change effect is already eating away at the shoreline.

Anyway, I hope y’all enjoy this mix of listening and reading, analysis and imagination, descriptions of ongoing catastrophes and hope for the future.

It’s not the hope of billionaires, that they’re entitled to destroy the world and get away with it with their luxury bunkers or a space shuttle to Mars. It’s the hope of people who are suffering in one way or another, who know that the disaster is real… and people who are also learning how to foster relationships of survival and practices of healing… people who have learned to see through the historical erasure and discover that we are surrounded by the immanent possibility of entirely different ways of living. We just have to seize them, breathe life into them, and believe them.

Spread the word: we can get through this.

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