M-L-M Mayhem!

I have another book coming out with Zero Books:  Methods Devour Themselves , co-written by one of my favourite SFF authors, Benjanun Sriduangkaew. As some of you might know I have been a long time SFF fan. On my lesser read "cultural" blog I have written more frequently about SFF, particularly the work of Sriduangkaew . Collaborating with her on a book that was a combination of story and essay was something of a dream come true. In fact, seeing my name along with hers on the cover of a publication was one of those SFF fan "squee" moments––but in a more professorial manner befitting of a jaded leftist and academic pushing 40. Methods Devour Themselves  is a conversation between Sriduangkaew's stories and my essays, where one begets the other and vice versa, a dialogical experience that becomes a liminal literature. The question guiding the book's structure was: what philosophical exploration will this story provoke and what story will be provoked by th

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&

Over the past year and a half this blog, which has always pretty eclectic, has developed an audience that is less interested in my posts about movies and books and art.  Interestingly enough, in the first year of my blog the only posts that garnered any traffic beyond my friend and comrade circles were those posts about movies and books.  Indeed, the first post that was ever reblogged was my long analysis of Pascal Laugier's Martyrs .  Now my reviews and analyses of art and literature and film generate far less traffic than other posts, so I stopped blogging about the cultural sphere of the superstructure about a year ago. (This is not to say that I am interested in only blogging about those subjects that garner the most traffic.  If that was the case, I would blog only about obituaries of people I disliked.  After all, my posts about the late Jack Layton and the late Vaclav Havel are so far my most popular. [The latter received over 1000 hits on the first day of its posting!  

Those readers who know a little of my life beyond this blog are quite aware that, aside from writing and ranting about political theory, I have also wasted many an hour writing unpublished and unread novels.  So at the behest of my partner and some other comrades, I finally decided that, rather than continue to waste time with generic form rejection letters that usually tell me that my submitted manuscripts have not been read, I have decided to offer one of my shorter novels (more of a novella, really, because it's just barely over 130 pages) for free on this blog.  The point is to ask my readers what they think of my novel, whether or not it's worth publishing, and get at least someone (I'm aiming for maybe three people - yes my standards are that low!) to read my fiction. This novel, A Continent of History , is a noirish mix of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror (with obvious political under/overtones) and was initially written for a 3-Day Novel contest that I failed to win––an

[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

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