CJW: Welcome, friends.
Last weekend I wrote a bonus letter all about the music of Refused - Refused Are Fucking (Un)dead. I’ve been listening to them for 20 years, so I had some thoughts… To get access, see our future bonus letters, and dive into the full archive, you can become a supporter.
Corey J. White (CJW) - Sci-fi author. Newsletter facilitator. Naarm/Melbourne.
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - Author & podcaster. Your fabulous goth aunt. On Wurundjeri land in Melbourne, Australia. @marleejaneward
Austin Armatys (AA) - Writer/Teacher/Wretched Creeper // Oh Nothing Press
m1k3y (MKY) - Wallfacer / ecopoet // Dark Extropian Musings / pryvt.rsrch
Right before the riot police came it was quiet; dense smoke swirled over the road. A sense of unease settled over me. A squad of about 25 fully suited and armed riot police came marching over the hill. It was like something out of a movie. The officers approached the wall of students and protesters with intense intimidation tactics. They went for the loudest and most motivating people first, the natural leaders, grabbing their arms and pulling them into the police van if they didn’t comply.
Courage is not the absence of fear, but being scared and doing the thing anyway. The kids are alright. The world we are gonna leave for them is not.
Have you seen the footage? I hope the copper who staunched this kid feels like a big man.
CJW: Famous last words:
The number of police didn’t worry me then, we were told they were there to protect us.
In a year when we’ve seen Australian police go after whistleblowers and violently disperse climate change protestors, the authoritarian creep is become more and more apparent. I swear that as little as 15 years ago there was a strong anti-authoritarian undercurrent in Australia, but now conservative commentators are eager to tell us that the useless, no-future protestors deserve what they get at the hands of the police, and demand POC shut their mouths about issues of race and colonialism, all whilst still claiming we’re a country of laid-back larrikins.
But sure, send the police after school children while you pat yourself on the back for giving everyone a “fair go”. Everyone that’s white, cishet, wealthy, and alive now. Because fuck everyone else, and fuck the future.
AA: Crikey had a summary of our country’s “slide” (more of an enthusiastic leap) towards authoritarianism in 2019. It’s been a big year for Banal Systemic Evil, and these people must be exhausted, the poor dears. Like, remember when the cops said it was totally fine to routinely strip-search children? I’d already forgotten about that one. Excited to see how they outdo themselves in 2020.
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MJW: How the rich plan to rule a burning planet
To believe that someone in Morrison’s position could genuinely be ignorant of the dangers of climate change is itself to give up on reason. The prime minister of Australia is among the most well-briefed people on the planet, with thousands of staff at his beck and call to update him on the latest developments in climate science or any other field he may wish to get his head around. The only rational explanation is that Morrison and his like are aware of the dangers posed by climate change but are choosing to act as though they’re not.
[…]
Publicly, they’re telling school kids not to worry about the future. Behind the scenes, however […] they’re hard at work, planning for a future in which they can maintain their power and privilege amid the chaos and destruction of the burning world around them.
CJW: Climate change denial is/as class solidarity and class warfare. The rich and powerful will only look after their own kind.
First, they’re building their military might – spending billions of dollars on ensuring they have the best means of destruction at their disposal to help project their power in an increasingly unstable world. Second, they’re building walls and brutal detention regimes to make sure borders can be crossed only by those deemed necessary to the requirements of profit making. Third, they’re enhancing their repressive apparatus by passing anti-protest laws and expanding and granting new powers to the police and security agencies to help crush dissent at home.
AA: “Many of what we call ‘conspiracies’ are the ruling class showing class solidarity.”
MKY: yeah, I believe Graeber called this ‘the communism of the rich’ in Debt too.
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CJW: Jeff Bezos’s Vision of the Future Is Basically Blade Runner (via Sentiers)
The richest man in the world with an intent to “save the Earth,” Bezos has claimed that space travel is “the only way” he can see to effectively deploy his enormous wealth — a statement he saw fit to make while simultaneously working to defeat a small tax increase in Seattle that would have bolstered programs to help the city’s soaring homeless population.
He pretends that he wants to save humanity, but instead of using his vast wealth and networks of connection to work toward a livable planet, he pushes these untenable sci-fi dreams. Either he wants a plutocratic exit strategy (because, honestly, can you imagine trillions of humans living on Earth or in its orbit?), or he wants to be the God-Emperor of Space. If he worked to fix the Earth, he wouldn’t be in control of it because there are these pesky things called established governments, nations, and borders. But if he colonises space he would be recognised as the Godhead and saviour of us all.
So what I’m saying is… GUILLOTINE GUILLOTINE GUILLOTINE GUILLOTINE
MKY: “Bezos is convinced that humanity will fall prey to “stasis and rationing” if we remain on Earth” which is basically still Earth in the 23rd Century space future a la The Expanse. Which is to say, a few more up-to-date - and less low hanging - scifi references might’ve helped this piece, which I otherwise loved. But also: HANG BEZOS!, or at least sentence him to servitude in the fulfilment mines. And finally… if he really wanted to get humanity off-world he’d be investing in a freaking space elevator, not playing space bro in space… but then, that would be creating something resembling infrastructure for all, instead of the few. Etc etc UGH
AA: Just here to note that Jeff Bezos appeared in Star Trek Beyond looking like a giant testicle:
If you want to read more about Bezos’ schemes, this article Jeff Bezos’s Master Plan is worth a read, and it includes this very relevant section:
What worries Bezos is that in the coming generations the planet’s growing energy demands will outstrip its limited supply. The danger, he says, “is not necessarily extinction,” but stasis: “We will have to stop growing, which I think is a very bad future.” While others might fret that climate change will soon make the planet uninhabitable, the billionaire wrings his hands over the prospects of diminished growth.
Also, I just watched Elon Musk do a guest voice on Rick and Morty. Eh, ok. I look forward to Peter Thiel’s turn as “insectoid bounty hunter that befriends Baby Yoda” on The Mandalorian.
MKY: Now you’ve got me wondering if Bezos is directly using his Amazon streaming platform to, uh, platform the space future he wants to see. Eg “saving” The Expanse, commissioning an adaptation of the Culture series and the Dark Forest books. And - like Elon using Culture ship names for his craft, but being so far removed from the point of those books - I wonder if he’s actually read them first, or just gone ‘oh, it’s a space thing’ -signs cheque-
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MKY: The UN climate conference has failed. What now?
If this COP gave us anything, it was the gift of clarity: our moment is shockingly serious, and almost no one in power is acting that way… As it is, the international climate negotiation process isn’t broken, it’s working exactly as intended: the requirement of universal consensus means that fossil-fuel backed petrostates can veto any action. That means any solution on climate change on the scale that the science requires must be revolutionary – driven by a continued escalation of non-violent protests worldwide – and will require the creation of an entirely new system on an emergency timescale.
Also, someone start making climate action political messages like this for #auspol (etc etc) already.
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Cutting Room Floor:
AA: Towards a Transcendental Deduction of Jungle
This extensive interview with Robin McKay covers “the establishment of the CCRU, and the importance of music (particularly jungle) to that scene”. The interview was conducted by Christopher Haworth as part of his research project, Music and the Internet: Towards a Digital Sociology of Music.
…jungle became important and at that point it was almost as if techno became the enemy because of its 4/4 rigidity and its lack of syncopation and polyrhythm (…) druidic trance techno on the one hand, as a kind of representative of the great monorhythmic priesthood of metric regularity for the purposes of transcendence, and jungle on the other hand as this kind of weird multitemporal hybrid entity dedicated to picking apart the body and disrupting it with polyrhythm and with bass.
AA:I don’t read many superhero comics (the last one I remember really enjoying was Warren Ellis’ Moon Knight, and a quick search seems to suggest that came out in 2013(!)) but on m1k3y’s recommendation I tracked down House of X / Powers of X, a pair of mini-series that rebooted Marvel’s X-men line of comics. And you know what? It was some surprisingly good shit!
While reading it, I kept thinking of David Mitchell’s work, particularly Cloud Atlas, which shared a similarly expansive fractured time-line and density of wild ideas. And it’s that density that really makes these comics work - this is high-concept action-adventure sci-fi more than it is “superhero comics”. Machine intelligences, the nature of reality, time-travel conundrums - writer Jonathan Hickman used the ever-malleable mutant metaphor to take us into some more contemporary realms of thought, while still remaining relatively accessible to new (or newly returned) readers.
CJW: This is an innovative and expansive bit of sci-fi comics. The many lives of Moira Kinross are an interesting way of recontextualising (and perhaps later revisiting) different aspects of the X-Men continuity - weaving together disparate storylines to create something both new and familiar. The comics’ highest points sparked the kind of thoughts where I either wanted to pitch something in this new continuity, or write something of my own with a similar structure and scale.
But, as much as I enjoyed the multi-faceted story being told here, by the time the twin series end, it arrives at an all too familiar-feeling continuity reboot. I wanted a definitive ending to the story being told here, but that’s not the point of these serials.
MJW: I’ve shifted from listening to horrific true crime podcasts and onto history podcasts instead. There’s nothing wrong with being obsessed with the old TC, but I just can’t bear to listen to another brutal tale of violence.
Okay, yeah, history is pretty violent.
It’s just that I feel a bit more like I’m learning something, rather than letting various tales of violent jerks assault my ears for hours on end. (The straw that broke the camel’s back was True Crime Bullshit, a podcast about serial killer Israel Keyes that, while well-done, was full of lengthy, monotonous, and banal interviews with Keyes himself. I honestly could not finish, could not listen to one more instance of Keyes laughing off-handedly at something horrific he had done to another human being.)
My new binge of this late is The Fall of Civilisations Podcast. I just think it’s kind of timely? The show is beautifully researched, well-put-together, and narrated by the most soothing British man to ever narrate a podcast (though if you’ve got another example, please let me know. I need my soothing Brits.) I’ve worked my way through all of them, and heartily recommend every episode, but I especially liked number 8: The Sumerians, and 7: The Songhai Empire.
CJW: I’m not going to tell you about anything I did in 2019, instead, let me tell you about some of the best Australian SF of the past few years: Marlee Jane Ward’s Orphancorp trilogy of novellas, the final book of which was published earlier this year.
Across the trilogy MJW uses a distinct voice to create a vivid collection of characters who emerge from the page breathing, cursing, and fighting for a better life. If the series was only about these characters and their relationships - the ways damaged people can connect and forge families against a hostile system, and the importance of pushing beyond your many hurts and your pain to make those connections - it would still be phenomenal and worth a read, but MJW also weaves real-world issues into the books, like for-profit prisons, the plight of refugees, working conditions at Amazon-like warehouses, and the myriad of tiny ways our world is skewing more and more dystopian. It’s a series that not only cares about its characters, but also cares about people in the real world, a series that burns with anger toward injustice, but without ever losing sight of the small, real, and hurting people at the heart of its narrative.
They’re published here in Australia, so newsletter readers from elsewhere may need to pay a little extra and wait a little longer for these books, but they’re brilliant and heartfelt and brave, and I can’t recommend them highly enough.
Welcome to Orphancorp | Psynode | Prisoncorp
AA: Corey is one of the hardest-working people I know. Once he wrapped up The Void Witch Saga (his trilogy of gritty hyperkinetic space opera novellas from Tor.com) he was on to, like, a million other projects. One of these - his first novel - was Repo Virtual, which Warren Ellis blurbed as, “Cyberpunk’s critical update, for these mixed-reality days of dark money, livestreaming cults, machine gaze and life lived on the razorwire edge.”
Doesn’t that sound good? Of course it fucking does. You can pre-order it here. And of course he’s already writing his next thing! And he’s editing Creeper 002! And sharing thoughts on his blog about the writing process, book reviews and cultural criticism! He’s a berserker and must be stopped.
m1k3y has been busy this year too, although in ways that are less publicly-facing. From what I can tell, he’s studying hard, keeping healthy and taking care of a charming hound. Maybe, if you’re lucky, he’ll drop a picture of the dog here for our collective edification? But what regularly astounds me is how far ahead of the curve m1k3y truly is - he dropped instalments of his “Field Notes from the proto Invisibles Monastery” as bonus content for the newsletter, and each one contained a wild mixture of speculation, rants and spirited analysis, often filtered through pop culture. Here’s a bit that resonated with me:
Part of the necessary construction project for building the next civilisation is finding and testing elegant solutions to these problems. Salvaging what we can from whatever’s available that might have a clue to solving the puzzle - history, fiction, fever dreams - and building out the next iteration. But first, we need to simplify; and maybe stop begging the State to grant us back our natural born freedoms.
History, fiction, fever dreams. That’s m1k3y. You can support him on Patreon here.
And then there’s me. I’ve been hustling to get the next few releases ready at Oh Nothing Press (MechaDeath and Creeper 001 are still available over on the site, including pretty reasonably-priced/free digital copies), and I’ve just released the first episode of my ambient music project Sleep Agent. You can watch it on YouTube, where I described it as such:
Ambient adventures and soft paranoia. Perfect for studying cursed lore or inducing an exciting nap. Caution: Cognitive prophylactics recommended. No further correspondence with dread entities with be entered into.
If you like ambient music/trippy visuals, please have a listen and let me know what you think!
Oh, and if you’re a writer of non-fiction with an idea for a short article that might suit Creeper Magazine, please hit up creepermagsubmissions@gmail.com. We would love to get some newsletter readers involved!
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CJW: That was one helluva write-up, AA. I really hope everyone is paying attention to what Austin is doing under the ONP banner, because he’s consistently out there exploring the weirder niches of culture, and always ahead of the zeitgeist - I’ve lost count of the number of times things Austin and I have discussed or planned have appeared in one form or another months or even years down the track.
And that’s it for another year. I for one won’t be sad to put 2019 in the rearview mirror.
I hope you enjoyed/are enjoying the holiday season, and are spending time with people you want, rather than those you feel obligated to see. Because “shoulds” don’t matter any longer. Either the world is ending, so fuck expectations, or we’re going to forge ahead and create a different sort of future, in which case, fuck the expectations of the old world. Live the life you want to. Don’t take any shit, and don’t let the bastards get you down. But at the same time, be kind to those who deserve it, love whoever you want and whoever you can, and remember that vulnerability is a kind of strength.