M-L-M Mayhem!

EDIT/UPDATE (25/01/2016): When I wrote this it was directly following the Mixon Report and thus was unable to a thorough social investigation beyond what was already written and claimed. Since then I have become convinced that my initial suspicions about the Report's opportunism, and the character of those lining up to punish/silence Sriduangkaew, were not only correct but did not go far enough. Only a few months after I wrote this at least one response to the Mixon Report was written, thus providing me with a bigger picture of the event. Since then (based on investigation, my own experience with Sriduangkaew's blog, interactions with her detractors and Sriduangkaew) I have become convinced that the targeting of Sriduangkaew was not only designed to silence her criticism of an author who was poised to release a best-selling work that was extremely orientalist (Tricia Sullivan's Shadowboxer ), but was isometric to the open reactionary politics expressed by the "Puppies&

One of my good friends and comrades, knowing that I'm a sci-fi/fantasy geek at heart, recently emailed me a link to the translated file of Kirill Eskov's The Last Ringbearer .  For those who are unaware of this novel, it is to The Lord of the Rings  trilogy what Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea  was to Jane Eyre  or, more appropriately perhaps, what Gregory Maguire's Wicked  (the novel, not the simplistic musical adaptation) was to The Wizard of Oz .  That is, a political literature of detournement: Rhys wrote the story of the racialized first wife of Rochester, excavating the colonial commitments of British gothic literature; Maguire challenged the colonial and sexist chauvinism of Frank L. Baum (it is worth recalling that this was a man who penned articles about the necessity of extreminating indigenous peoples) by transforming a Wicked Witch into a revolutionary, the Wizard into an imperialist.  Now we have Eskov who, in 1999, wrote a book that was both a sequel and rein

The dogmatic assumption that the Bolsheviks simply seized power in 1917 due to one magical moment of insurrection has caused serious problems for the theory of revolutionary strategy.  Here, then, is a simplistic formula resulting from this dogma: a party just needs to be a tiny organization that agitates for revolution, waits for the time to be "right", and then conveniently appears to take the reigns of the popular uprising it agitated for––a cabal of militants accepted by the masses who have finally learned the truth. If I am oversimplifying the insurrection discourse surrounding the October Revolution, I am only doing so because this is, in fact, the most common interpretation of the events surrounding the Russian Revolution.  So common, in fact, that bourgeois ideologues maintain that this was what happened: there was a popular movement, we are told, that the Bolsheviks helped grow and that they opportunistically seized when the time was right… Because, hey, Lenin'

[Even though it is not yet midnight, I am posting this now in order to prove that, simply by the use of rational thinking, I am a better "prophet" than idiots like Harold Camping.] Well the rapture didn't happen as Harold Camping, reactionary dispensationalist astrologer, was proclaiming .  Not that this will matter too much to Camping or his followers: like any cunning Delphic Oracle, his mystic pronouncements contained an escape plan––God being "tenderhearted and full of mercy" could possibly, according to Camping, choose to delay his doomsday.  Just as he did in 1988 and in 1994, the other two apocalypse dates Camping once championed.  And since Camping's delusions were proved wrong in the past, the failure of the Rapture to materialize on May 21st 2011 will just be another date to be worked into a more elaborate con, perhaps in another decade. Harold Camping: soothsayer who was hopefully taken up to heaven yesterday, sometime around 9 pm EST, whe

For those of us who call ourselves "communist" the problem of failed communist led revolutions, most notably Russia and China, is always something we have to confront.  Or, more accurately, this false dilemma is always something we are forced to confront––raised by those who feel they have some special insight about ideology and history, and that they've caught us in a problem we've never bothered to think about until they brought it to our attention.  It's like they imagine that we crawled out of the end of the nineteenth century and have never heard that the two great world-shaking revolutions failed to establish world communism: "communism was already tried, haven't you heard, and it clearly doesn't work because: [insert some empty platitude, most probably that idiot Winston Churchill aphorism, here]." To be fair, some self-proclaimed communists have crawled out of the end of the nineteenth century or, at the very least, the beginning of th

"There on the margins between known and unknown, the male conquistadors, explorers and sailors become creatures of transition.  As such, they were dangerous..." (Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather ) 1: civilizational delirium A village burned to the ground.  Corpses stacked in heaps of ash and bone.  Women shuddering, huddled together.  Armed men, crusaders at the edge of Christendom, presiding over the post-slaughter.  This landscape is one of the many nightmare settings of Nicholas Winding Refn's strange and obscurist film Valhalla Rising .  Encountered by the film's mute protagonist One-Eye in the second chapter, the post-massacre village is significant because it is one of the only two settings in the film that references a settled and civilized stability, but a stability marked by absence––an erasure.  It is also the only setting where women are depicted, however briefly, on camera. trailer for Valhalla Rising (2009) Having escaped and murdered the men who

This is an excerpt from a piece of short fiction I'm trying to clean up for publication. Unfortunately it was already rejected once by Strange Horizons... I'm posting this small excerpt here so that friends and comrades can comment/critique and let me know if it's just worth abandoning altogether. [And the short story, for any interested parties, is itself an excerpt of an unpublished novel.] When I was thirteen my brother returned from the war. His body was intact but his mind was an amputated limb. He would stare at the wall for hours. Sometimes he would scream until he lost his voice. Other times he would hold conversations with the ghosts of dead comrades. And though his madness was occasionally punctuated by moments of lucidity, my parents committed him to the lunatic asylum. Since Koenag had lost the war the veterans were an embarrassment. The patriots saw them as Koenag’s failure to retain independence. Those who welcomed the invaders saw my brother and his

This is a continuation and completion of an essay I started a while back .  Hopefully the interested reader (if there are any) will read the earlier entry first. III - Progressive and Reactionary Dynamics in Fantasy Although there are traditions in fantasy literature that have never been connected to the “feudalism lite” that dominates high fantasy (the so-called “new weird” and its precedents, for example), what is often called “high fantasy” or “heroic fantasy”––that medieval kind of fantasy where there are sword fights and wizards––is definitely dominated by idyllic and reactionary tendencies.  From the conservative Terry Goodkinds (with his “mud people” and oriental despots) to the liberal Russell Kirkpatricks or Karen Millers, a mystified and imaginary feudalism dominates the genre. But there is now an emergence of a high fantasy literature that attempts to overcome the tropes of problematized in the previous sections.  After George R.R. Martin there is Steven Erikson (th

I - mystification in fantasy literature What China Mieville once called “ feudalism lite ” still forms the backbone of much fantasy literature. Whereas Mieville rightly criticizes many of the symptoms (ie. boys and magic rings or swords, etc.), I find that the most pernicious aspect of this literature is the mystification of feudalism as a mode of production. Although Mieville does mention this problem, I want to examine it in more detail. I am interested in examining that extremely popular fantasy literature where a distorted and ahistorical version of feudalism is celebrated. While it is true that there has been a recent trend of grittiness (reviled and called a “fad” by those who want a return to sterile feudalism), feudalism lite still dominates fantasy. The spectre of Tolkien has not been completely exorcized. The “idiocy of rural life” in this literature is depicted as honest and robust. Heroes come from small villages where, aside from a few bad apples, everyone is g

"There must be a human history… It will become a ghost-history, as all your species vanish and become impossible." -Mary Gentle, Ash: A Lost History - I want to imagine Mary Gentle’s Ash: A Lost History as the mythic Burgundy and mythic Carthage that, according to the novel, have been irrevocably lost––written over by our history and recalled only as rubble strewn throughout our past. The book within the book, the “Fraxinus” manuscript and the notes of its translator and editor, is described as being pulled from circulation, disappearing into myth like the lost history it was meant to excavate. Is it really strange, then, that Gentle’s award-winning Ash would vanish behind the wavefront of publication, following the fate of her novel’s subject matter? Ash appears in the late 1990s to much excitement and acclaim. Like the archaeological manifestation of Visigoth Carthage and its golems, Ash is a revelation. Over 1000 pages, a footnoted book within a book, a cunnin