It Could Happen Here - CZM Book Club Presents: Hermetica Interview with Alan Lea

Episode Date: September 21, 2025

Margaret sits down with author Alan Lea to discuss his novella, Hermetica.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. I'm Jorge Ramos. And I'm Paola Ramos. Together we're launching The Moment, a new podcast about what it means to live through a time as uncertain as this one. We sit down with politicians, artists, and activists

to bring you death and analysis from a unique Latino perspective. The moment is a space for the conversations we've been having us, father and daughter, for years. Listen to The Moment with Jorge Ramos and Paola Ramos. on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On a cold January day in 1995, 18-year-old Krista Pike killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer

in the woods of Knoxville, Tennessee. Since her conviction, Krista has been sitting on death row. How does someone prove that they deserve to live? We are starting the recording now. Please state your first and last name. Krista Pike. Listen to Unrestorable Season 2, Proof of Life, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I just normally do straight stand-up, but this is a bit different. What do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club? Answer, a new podcast called Wisecrack, where a comedian finds himself at the center of a chilling true crime story.

Does anyone know what show they've come to see? It's a story. It's about the scariest night of my life. This is Wisecrack, available now. Listen to Wisecrack on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The murder of an 18-year-old girl in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved for years, until a local housewife, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story. America, y'all better wake the hell up.

Bad things happens to good people in small towns. Listen to Graves County on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And to binge the entire season, add free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Book club, book club, book club, book club, book club, book club, book club, book club. Hello, and welcome to Cool Zone Media Book Club, the only book club where you don't have to do the reading, because I do it for you. And I know what you're thinking, you're thinking, how has this been a proper book club when you do the reading, but then there's no discussion? Well, this week, we're going to have a discussion. And we have on not only the author, Alan Lee, of the book that you just listen to, Hermitica,

but also Hazel, who helps a lot with Book Club. And so that way it's an actual conversation between a bunch of people. How are you, Alan? I'll start with Alan. I don't know. I'm here. Yay. And a variety of complex and ineffable ways.

Love this for you. Hi. I'm also feeling complex and enephable. That was an incredible description. I had a little smoothie for breakfast. I got up early. I'm so proud of myself. We are here at the crack of 10 a.m.

To record for you all. Eastern time. Eastern time. That's how much we all love you. So there's a book. It's called Hermitica. We just listen to it. well, you all just listened to it.

Well, I don't know, whatever. And we want to talk about it. Hazel, what do you got? Yeah, let's start off with just where the book came from. Can you tell us a little bit about where you found inspiration for this and maybe where you typically find inspiration for your fiction? Well, every writing process is different. I did the vast majority of the writing for Hermitica in a very frenzied month early in the COVID pandemic.

So the feelings of lockdown may have shown up a little bit in the claustrophobia of the work. Maybe, I mean, probably not. Context isn't real. But no, it definitely is real. And so that was a part of it while also thinking about evolving technologies of social control and surveillance. Far more than the pandemic, I would say social media actually really shows up in this book, the compartmentalizing siloed effect of social media. media, how it allows people's reality to be controlled, how it really, really limits and cuts

down on people's social interactions while giving them the illusion of having more social interactions when in fact these interactions could be, you know, it could be AI, it could be robots on the other end of things. And in any case, it's not tactile. It's not, you know, olfactory. like you're so rarely actually in the room with people or walking down the street with people. And then, of course, always and connected to that, a lot of thinking about different options that the state may have for responding to the ecological crisis, to responding to, you know, these building pressures that may lead towards collapse and what different forms of totalitarianism might look like today. Is it frustrating to have been prescient so fast about the AI thing? Where like, because I think in 2020, 2021, it was less likely that the people that you would be arguing with on the internet were literally not people, right? But these days more and more, if you're arguing with someone on the internet, there's like a really good chance you're just straight up arguing with a cell phone somewhere that is like running a program.

Personally, as an anarchist, I feel like that's a part of our lot has been like incredibly frustrated with, like, it's not like, it's not like, an ego thing. It's not like an all I told you thing. It's like seeing people that you care about, jump joyfully onto a sledge and go full speed down a snowy hill right into like a trash compactor. And at the beginning you're like, there's a trash compactor right there and you have to

watch this whole beautiful descent and then just the horror of all the blood and gore flying and then do that over and over again every year, every century. I think sometimes I wake up with like, I don't know, Emma Goldman or Alexander

Berkman like screaming through my mouth things that like should have been obvious at the end of the 19th century and you know we just keep diving headfirst into it but somehow we're surviving this trash compactor world so yeah it can be frustrating and it can also be inspiring on some dark levels that like you know we're still here.

Yeah. Yeah. It's heavy. We're still here. Give us another one. Go through the matcher again. Yeah, back onto the sled, motherfuckers. Yeah. Alan, you're somebody who I came across first through, like, nonfiction, particularly

through, like, how to live in the trash compactor world. And I remember you handed me this book, and I went, oh, my friend, my friend writes fiction, too. I'm wondering if you could talk about, like, I know that fiction is important to you in your personal life. And I'm wondering specifically if you could talk about your relationship with fiction and how the fiction that you write complements your nonfiction work. Yeah.

So it's not really a secret anymore, but I also write a lot of nonfiction under another name, which, you know, you might be able to find out any sleuths out there. Oh, we've been saying it at the top and bottom of every episode that people should check out your books. We got permission from you to do this. I want to be really clear about this. Oh, yeah, no, I know.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But how about we don't say that name at all during this whole interview? and then we'll force our sleuths out there in case any of them haven't to listen to the book. Oh, okay. Yeah. Well, you know, at low bar,

low bar for sleuthing these days. Like, I mean, all of the big mysteries are obvious. Like, yes, it is genocide. Yes, we are heading towards billions of deaths and math extinction. Like, they don't even have to hide it anymore. Yeah, from early on, I had a lot more luck getting the nonfiction published.

Some of it is luck. Some of it is also that the fiction world is way more, especially speculative fiction is way more monopolized or concentrated into like five massive evil corporations. They control such a larger share of the speculative fiction that is published than in the nonfiction world where you have a lot more independent presses that have managed to hold on. And that might be starting to change again for the better as far as fiction is concerned, but it can be really difficult to get fiction published. So even though I might like my my non-fiction writing is definitely way more widespread.

I've been writing fiction since I was a little kid, both as a form of survival and a form of pure, unmitigated joy. When I was a teeny little kid, I would just kind of walk back and forth in the woods or, you know, if I was stuck in the house, stuck in the house, just kind of imagining different worlds and stories and whatnot.

And also, like, as one becomes more and more aware of, like, the world around them, I don't want to take, like, a utilitarian approach, either to nonfiction or to fiction, I think they both can and should be acts of joy, of desperation, of rage, of curiosity, but they're both, you know, tools for, for understanding the world around us, for interacting with the world around us. And basically, the real world can't exist without the imaginary world. And that's true on a mathematical level. That's also true on the level of, like, how societies organize themselves. Like, we need imagination and

imagination can also really allow us to better understand or change the world that we live in. But if that were true, then Marx's pure materialism might not be fully correct. And so I actually think you must be wrong because Marx said that everything is material. I'm probably wrong. And though I do prefer cash money, like it seems like money. I don't know, it's almost as though money were not that material. I'm just trying to say that social constructs are real. I do think this is one of the great gifts of anarchism, though, is that, like, a lot of our, like, great anarchists are, like, also fiction writers, you know, like, Ursula K. Le Guin was

predominantly a fiction writer. I think this is, like, a thing that's really special about the anarchist tradition is that we are so interwoven in with fiction and with imagination. and along with exploring how big themes show up in our actual lives, also exploring how things could be different or how things could be worse. Yeah. I think that we kind of like missed a period. When I first started writing fiction or like reading about anarchist fiction,

I was like, oh, where is it? And I had trouble finding it a while ago. And that's changed completely. And then, yeah, if I look back historically, there is so much fiction in, the anarchist movement and like the left and you know whatever more broadly and it it just kind of it stopped being the thing that people were focused on for a little while and focus on is the wrong word right i don't think we should all like writing novels isn't the way

the way that we change the world right it's like one of the ways that we influence the world and also survive inside the trash compactor but margaret you know how else we survive inside the trash compactor and influence the world? Is it the fact that our podcast is sponsored by goods and services that people can rely on for every single need they have and we can rely on for modest income? I do like a modest income and I do love the fact that I hate capitalism with the strong exception of anything that is plugged on this podcast. That's right.

Here's all the stuff we personally love that we have absolutely no control over because it's just ads. I'm Jorge Ramos. And I'm Paola Ramos. Together we're launching The Moment, a new podcast about what it means to live through a time, as uncertain as this one. We sit down with politicians. I would be the first immigrant mayor in generations, but 40% of New Yorkers were born outside of this country. Artists and activists, I mean, do you ever feel demoralized?

I might personally lose hope. This individual might. lose the faith. But there's an institution that doesn't lose faith. And that's what I believe in. To bring you depth and analysis from a unique Latino perspective. There's not a single day that Paola and I don't call or text each other sharing news and thoughts about what's happening in the country. This new podcast will be a way to make that ongoing intergenerational conversation public. Listen to The Moment with Jorge Ramos and Paola Ramos as part of the MyCultura podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Ed. Everyone say hello, Ed.

From a very rural background myself, my dad is a farmer, and my mom is a cousin. So, like, it's not like... What do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club? I know it sounds like the start of a bad joke, but that really was my reality nine years ago. I just normally do straight stand-up, but this is a bit different. On stage stood a comedian with a story that no one expected to hear. Well, 22nd of July 2015, a 23-year-old man had killed his family.

And then he came to my house. So what do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club? A new podcast called Wisecrack, where stand-up comedy and murder takes center stage. now. Listen to Wisecrack on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a tape recorder statement. The person being interviewed is Krista Gail Pike. This is in regards to the death of a Colleen slimmer.

She just started going off on me and I hit her. I just hit her and hit her and hit her. On a cold January day in 1995, 18-year-old Krista Pike killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in the woods of Knoxville, Tennessee. Since her conviction, Krista has been sitting on death row. The state has asked for an execution date for Krista. We let people languish in prison for decades, raising questions about who we consider fundamentally unrestorable. How does someone prove that they deserve to live?

We are starting the recording now. Please state your first and last name. Krista Pike Listen to Unrestorable Season 2, Proof of Life, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half-truth is a whole lie. For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved, until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward

with a story. I'm telling you, we know Quincy Kilder, we know. A story that law enforcement used to convict six people, and that got the citizen investigator on national TV. Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran. My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.

producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find. I did not know her and I did not kill her, or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that you all said. They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured gas on her. From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame. America, y'all better work the hell up.

Bad things happens to good people in small towns. Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. And we're back. I personally love to shower with that product that was just advertised. Oh, especially the internet mattresses. You love to shower with those internet mattresses.

Well, the best part is that there's like a whole series of categories of ads that we have completely banned. But sometimes they slip in anyway. And the most famous example of this is that a couple years ago, Cool Zone Media had some ads for joining the Washington State Highway Patrol. Oh, God. And then I was listening once, and I got an ad for Become a Jailer. Oh, geez. I got an ad once for Become a Jailer in Ohio specifically.

Yeah, I think I was driving through Ohio when that happened to me. So if you're listening in Ohio, sorry. Yeah, don't do that. That's an exception. Anyway, so I want to fuss at you about this book. I really like this book. I just read it for the second time to a bunch of people. And there's a point near the end of this book.

Days is in job search jail. And in job search jail, Days is like thinking through, well, what if I go study moss but then work with people to step outside the system. And, you know, if this was a neat, simple narrative, this is what would happen, right? And I recognize that everyone has different ways of responding to things. But that's what I would do. right and i think that there's this interesting thing right you're presenting this like very grand metaphor and i think in the classic science fiction way you're presenting this grand metaphor for how you know all of our choices are illisory right i don't know i pronounce that word but it turns out

illusionary isn't a word and i'm really annoyed by that because illusionary should be the word because it makes more sense than illisory illusory i think that's a good job as a pronunciation it like brings out you know the word illusion yeah no that that makes me more sense. I have this problem where I read more than I talk, which is impressive because I talk for a living. But you have these illusionary choices. I'm going to try and make this fucking we're allowed to make words. Every word was made by a person. Yeah. Whoa. Until the future and when they're all made by robots and then we're shot if we use the wrong ones. In this job search metaphor jail, basically saying that like all choices that we make are totally illusionary

and, you know, illusion of freedom. Right. And there is no outside. the system is one of the main things in this metaphorical world, right? But all three of us are currently alive, and all three of us perceive ourselves as doing a complicated navigation with a system to kind of live outside and to try to open up the concept of an outside. So in my mind, the metaphor of this book and the actions that the character is choosing work within the context of this metaphor and not within the real world that it's representing. I don't have a question here. I'm just trying to challenge you about this part.

Yeah, so first referring really strictly to the story and then to get theoretical, if I may, after that, I don't see the book as a strict metaphor. Obviously, there's a lot of metaphor in it. I also intend it to be like a world that works, a world that might be our world someday, hopefully not, but might be in addition to a reflection on the world that we currently inhabit. I think Days makes the choice that makes the most sense for them. Days is a little bit crazy. Days is not like everyone else in terms of how emotionally and psychologically they relate with the rest of the world.

And instead of them being cast as neurodivergent, which in my humble opinion is just like a stupid, like literal synonym for abnormal, their craziness actually gives them strengths that other people don't have. It also deprives them of, like, some of the resources of, like, stronger human connection where they could just soldier on, you know, through the lies. They could soldier on through that prison world and keep surviving. So dying or possibly dying, suicide for them is a choice. I mean, there's also a great sadness to it. Like, days also, like, an habit's like a very sad world. They can't really survive in a prison once they realize that it's a prison. And that's the reality for a lot of us, you know, in this world,

in the real world. Like, there is always an outside. There are almost always other choices until we end up in maximum security prison. In maximum security prison, I mean, your choices are, you know, basically eat or, or don't eat. Like, try to kill yourself or try to survive, like, because of, like, the extreme level of physical constraint. But, like, you know, outside of prison in, in, you know, the rest of the world. a lot of us end up taking our own lives as a response to, like, prison society. And that's what Days does. I did bring in a couple other characters to reflect that there were other choices.

But, yeah, I just, I guess I feel like that, that was kind of where, you know, this character would end up based on who they are. No, it makes sense. And, like, it does make sense as the end of the story. I just have this, like, I think it was that reading the, like, oh, well, this other story would be like this. And I'm like, ah, that's the one I would pick, right? but I also do think it's kind of worth reflecting on,

not that people can only write about their own experiences, but the first time I met you, you handed me a book of short stories that you had written in prison. I can see how the experience of having, like, absolutely no control might have influenced. Like, I think a lot of people would write this as like a raw thought experiment.

They're like, oh, what if I was in job search prison? But you've been in, well, I think it wasn't job search prison that you were in. but I don't know how does this relate yeah I was in real prison different security levels from maximum security to minimum security that definitely relates I mean that definitely marked and influenced me as a person and at the same time one of the most remarkable things about it was when I went in there was nothing new about the experience there was nothing that didn't remind me about the psychiatric ward the one time in high school when I was hospitalized or

high school itself or all of these other institutions. Like, we really do live in a prison society that's not just a hyperbolic metaphor. And so, like, I mean, being in, like, an actual prison definitely, like, changes you and influences you, but also it's not an other reality. It's not exceptional. It's so similar to all the other institutions that make up our society. And that kind of also brings us to this question of, like, the outside of, like, you know, what's, you know, what's potentially outside of all of this. Like, I think a lot of radical academics will construct these really beautiful theories, these little airtight theories, almost, you know, airtight, like, you know, certain buildings

we might have just recently referred to. Hermetically sealed. Yeah, these hermetically sealed theories, exactly, thank you. And I think one of the problems with that is in a very kind of unconsciously colonial Western way. they're confusing influence with unfreedom. There's nowhere on the planet that is not influenced by capitalism in the state. We can find, like, you know, plastic trash at, like, the bottom of the deepest trench in the Pacific Ocean. But influence is not unfreedom.

Influence is actually freedom. Freedom is not, like, you know, I am an island, a sovereign island that, you know, is unencroached by other islands. It's that we are all influencing each other, but without, like, you know, undue pressure or constraint from, like, one of the beings or one of the forces within this overall network. And so on the one hand, like, it's really important to recognize that the state's imaginary, the state's model, the state's goal and their practice is to make sure that there is never any outside, that there is never any real independence or freedom from it. And at the same time, the state always fails in that goal, that there has always been an outside. Sometimes the

outside is right under the state's nose. Sometimes it's a the borderlands, sometimes it's in the crossing of borders, sometimes it's in illegible spaces, sometimes it's in huge rebellions, and sometimes it's in the choice that a single prisoner has with no other friends nearby, with no other connections to stop eating, to stop going along with it. And choice is a really important part of control. Domination works a lot better if they give us choices, if they give us elections, but there are always going to be more choices than the ones that were presented with. I like that.

I think that that is the kind of core of hermetica is the staring at the six choices on the board, you know, being like, oh, you can choose to wear the, I don't know, Che Guevara shirt and become a, like, you know, state-sanctioned radical or whatever. I don't know where I'm going with that. Someone saved me. You know what six choices this podcast offers you? I'm so sorry I was encountering this while we were like

going through the script of the book I was like I need to put an ad pivot in here but this is really heavy and I feel really bad pivoting to ads but we all also need to get paid and I am deeply deeply grateful in my gen deflection for the sponsors you make your own choices about whether you listen to them

I want everyone to understand how deeply we think about these ad pivots and see the inside baseball of how we think about these ad pivots and how they keep us awake at night to make the perfect ad pivot yes readers listeners if I may could we just all reach through the ether across the internet that the physical distance that separates us hold hands and genuflect to our sponsors that's right thank you for that word hazel yeah you're welcome and here they are ads wee I'm Jorge Ramos. And I'm Paola Ramos.

Together we're launching The Moment, a new podcast about what it means to live through a time, as uncertain as this one. We sit down with politicians. I would be the first immigrant mayor in generations, but 40% of New Yorkers were born outside of this country. Artists and activists, I mean, do you ever feel demoralized? I might personally lose hope. This individual might lose the faith, but there's an institution. that doesn't lose faith. And that's what I believe in.

To bring you depth and analysis from a unique Latino perspective. There's not a single day that Paola and I don't call or text each other, sharing news and thoughts about what's happening in the country. This new podcast will be a way to make that ongoing intergenerational conversation public. Listen to The Moment with Jorge Ramos and Paola Ramos as part of the MyCultura podcast network on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Ed.

Everyone say, hello, Ed. I'm from a very rural background myself. My dad is a farmer, and my mom is a cousin. So, like, it's not like... What do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club? I know it sounds like the start of a bad joke, but that really was my reality nine years ago. I just normally do straight stand-up, but this is a bit different.

On stage stood a comedian with a story that no one expected to hear. Here. Well, 22nd of July 2015, a 23-year-old man had killed his family. And then he came to my house. So what do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club? A new podcast called Wisecrack, where stand-up comedy and murder takes center stage. Available now. Listen to Wisecrack on the IHeart Radio app.

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a tape-recorded statement. The person being interviewed is Krista Gail Pike. This is in regards to the death of Colleen Slimmer. She started going off on me and I hit her. I just hit her and hit her and hit her and hit her. On a cold January day in 1995, 18-year-old Krista Pike killed 19-year-old Colleen Slimmer

in the woods of Knoxville, Tennessee. Since her conviction, Krista has been sitting on death row. The state has asked for an execution date for Krista. We let people languish in prison for decades, raising questions about who we consider fundamentally unrestorable. How does someone prove that they deserve to live? We are starting the recording now.

Please state your first and last name. Krista Pike. Listen to Unrestorable Seasons, Season 2, Proof of Life, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half-truth is a whole lie. For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved, until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story. I'm telling you, we know Quincy Kilder, we know.

A story that law enforcement used to convict six people, and that got the citizen investigator on national TV. Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran. My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, producer, And I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find. I did not know her and I did not kill her, or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said. They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured gas on her.

From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame. America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns. Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. and we're back i for one am glad we found our new god whatever the last sponsor was i feel bad for all the people who got the other advertisers because they're not our new god it's only the last other people are so doomed who yeah it's really just a lottery at least they're not

following any of the other many products and services that aren't advertised on the show that are shortly about to become because they're not on the show because they're not on the show show or because we live in a fascist cell state and everything's illegal now. Who knows? Let's talk about genre space instead. Okay. Yeah, Alan, I want to chat about genre space. This is a book to me that really reads like something from like a classic golden age

of sci-fi novella. It's got this like really sweeping metaphor that's not one to one. It's aiming towards like bigger sociological themes. There's like whole Socratic Assycrasta. about gender and I guess like that's something that I don't encounter very often anymore and it was really fun

to read something that felt to me like what if we took kind of the tone and the theme of something like Brave New World or 1984 or something that like I really grew up in middle school on and then gave it a fresh like modern anarchist

anti-authoritarian twist I don't know I guess I'm curious like you know could Could you tell us a little bit more about what was interesting to you about that tone and like how you came to that as the tropes and the frameworks that you were going to work within? I love that you that you bring that out because like for me that was like, this might seem odd, like almost like unconscious or like invisible to me because it's just kind of like I described this earlier as like a very feverish writing process.

So like I was like so in it that I could barely see it. and really some of the big influential works for me growing up and, you know, maybe also, like, in my 20s, let's see, I think you mentioned Kurt Vonnegut, like, you know, that definitely figures also a lot of, you know, the major works of magical realism, whether it's like Gabrieo Garcia-Marquez, 100 Years of Solitude, or like Bulgakov's Master and Margarita. I'll also say, like, the Truman Show. Like, this book feels, in a lot of ways, like a reverse Truman show. Yeah. That's true. The sky is real, so the sky is fake. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Getting even older, like before 1984, there's this lesser-known novel by Yvgeny Zemiatin. We, early Soviet novel, where, you know, one of the people to speak out around, like, this socialist revolution that was quickly turning into a hellscape. was a science fiction writer, and he wrote something that was certainly a huge influence on Orwell and is also, you know, very much about a surveillance society. I think a lot of those older works were a much greater influence on me than a lot of newer speculative fiction, which is not to say that the newer speculative fiction isn't there. I think there have been some really amazing works coming out lately. There's also been a lot of really mediocre stuff that gets huge, huge, huge platforms. But the great stuff I think still really has to generally

like pass this filter, which is designed more for the marketing of books. It's designed more for the limitations of editors and agents that are looking at, you know, hundreds of manuscripts or pitches a day. And so really, like, the way that, like, if we differentiated between a tool and a machine, we have more choice with a tool. We have more craft with a tool. We can use it to amplify our abilities to amplify our effect, whereas a machine, we just become adjuncts to the machine.

We have to feed material into the machine following parameters set by the machine. And I'd actually love to hear more from you, Margaret, about your experiences with both, like, larger publishers and independent publishers, but yeah, I think for me that's been, I guess I've sort of resisted some of the generic rules that have kind of come up in the last like 10 or 20 years that are really set by the industry slash machine. And I think I've kind of immersed myself more in, you know, looking back to other works of speculative fiction from, you know, decades and decades ago. I do have a different take on the way that publishing is working right now. I actually think that the publishing world does not shy away from radical content. It is that there's specific

asks in genre around form. And this has been true, I think forever, because genre fiction, literally by being genre fiction, has a certain commercial aspect to it and a certain like popular fiction aspect to it, which I actually think is one of its like more interesting advantages, right? I think it reaches more people than literature often. And so yes there is like kind of like lowest common denominator stuff and like the you know marvel movies or things like that right but i actually think that the genre fiction world right now is like alive with radicalism and i think that even at the major publishers most of the individual editors who are making these decisions are themselves very radical or at least progressive and tend to be progressive who are open to radical ideas this has been my experience i remember writing a short story about people using drones to kill CEOs and how that was fine. And I remember being like,

no one will ever touch this. And Strange Horizons published it and did a good job with it and it was reasonably well received. But I think that there are absolutely genre restrictions that change over time and you kind of have to play within them about ways of describing characters

and ways that plots work and who the interiority is with and things like that that are like larger social conventions of form. But I do think that it is interesting and good to be able to just also sometimes be like, but that's not what this book is. I don't fucking care, you know. And my other aside is it just to be really nerdy about anarchist fiction. You mentioned Vonnegut.

You mentioned Huxley and Orwell. And Vonnegut was a pacifist anarchist very explicitly. Huxley was an anarchist. Huxley specifically said in the introduction to, I think Island, his utopian novel that I haven't read since I was a teenager. He says what the world needs is decentralization of a Kropotkin's nature. And so what he's saying is what the world is need is anarchism, you know, and referencing Peter Kropokin. And of course, Orwell is a very complicated figure, but was certainly willing to throw grenades at fascists and get shot through the neck for that process. And so I will forgive a lot of

decisions that he made based on that. And he also specifically said, if I had gone to Spain to fight again, I would have gone with the anarchists if I had known what I knew going into it. Instead, he fought with an anti-state Marxist militia, the Pum, or whatever, it's more complicated than that. See, the entire first year of cool people who did cool stuff for me talking about the Spanish Civil War and also my episode about Orwell. But I think it's interesting that a lot of the people that we will reference as these sort of like grand figures of science fiction and like speculative concepts and even to throw one that i'm like always sort of afraid to throw in clockwork orange man anthony burgess was also an anarchist and you know obviously the movie of that isn't very interesting complicated edge lord piece

of fiction that is trying to explain a social idea and i am not really even trying to say anything about that right now. But I think that's interesting that it's coming from people who have this very specific set of critiques where they believe in both socialism and freedom, you know, where they believe we should take care of each other but also like be in charge of ourselves and that the state shouldn't be this massive domineering force. And so it's like really interesting to me that the golden age, I don't know if golden age is the right word, but all of these like classic works of dystopia and stuff were written by people who have this set of values. Yeah, yeah. Publishing currently, they're kind of capturing and publishing like a huge number of books of, you know, new stories. And on the one hand, you know, they're doing this in like a pretty harmful marketplace of ideas sort of way where they're like algorithmically from the first day. And so this is important for any, you know, any new authors out there, like get all of your friends, get everyone you can to like help you boost your book before it even, you know, hits the shelves because. Oh, yeah, with pre-orders.

pre-orders, you know, campaigns, buzz, like, you know, whatever, because, like, algorithms do so much of the decision-making now about, like, a major publisher. They're not just, you know, publishing, like, a dozen books here. They're publishing hundreds or thousands. And what they're doing is they're scooping up intellectual property, right? So they get a big cut. They may even be mediocre renditions of a story. They get scooped up by Hollywood and turned into, like, a blockbuster film that there's, like, a whole bunch of money in. And otherwise, they're basically just from, like, day one, upvoting or.

downvoting a book. And so they might be publishing like thousands of titles with the hopes that they get one or two bestsellers out of it. And so all of those other books, they get published. This author feels like, you know, they have this amazing experience of like, hey, my story's gotten out there. And really, it's kind of buried in an intellectual property vault. So on the one hand, you know, we have this like really damaging marketplace of ideas. But on the other hand, it does also really mean that the publishing industry is open. Just like you said, it's like a huge diversity of different kinds of stories to radical stories to people who just because of their gender or the color of their skin, you know, might have been barred from like a chance of

publishing speculative fiction in the not so distant past. Yeah, I think that brings us into like a nice outro. I wanted to end on just asking y'all what you've been reading recently. Anything you've been enjoying? Anything you would recommend? Well, let's see. I have definitely been keeping up on what Arcadi Martin has been writing. That's the author of a memory called Empire, also M. M. M. Yaco-Kandon. Hillary Mantell's historical fiction series, The Mirror and the Light,

I'm currently reading, the last one in that trilogy. And then, you know, I always, you know, go back to some old classics. Lately, I've been finding a lot of solace in Calvin and Hobbes, which is, I think, just some of the best metafiction that's ever been written. one of the first zines I was ever handed when I became an anarchist was like a big oversized zine that was like eight and a half by eleven stapled in the corner and it was Calvin and Hobbs as anarchist and they didn't change any of the words of any of the Calvin and Hobbs comics I remember that they just like organize them by like critiques of society critiques of school critiques of work yeah yeah so good I finished reading a book that is coming out soon by Car

Carter Keene, it's called Morsel, and it's a horror novella that's really good and, I don't know, has good, like, radical politics woven throughout a story about an ancient monster. I really liked that. Hazel, you read anything good? I have mostly been reading things that are, like, cozy and gentle, which is not quite the vibe of the things that you both were plugging. But I really enjoyed a song for the Wild Belt by Becky Jumbers, which is a novella about a tea monk who has a like steampunk-ass bicycle-powered little tea cart that they ride around. And then they meet this robot who like helps them go on a journey. And it's it's very sweet. It's about burnout and reconnecting with nature and regrowing part of your soul. I also really enjoyed a witch's guide to magical inkeeping by.

Sangu Mandana, which is about a witch who runs an inn and is trying to get her magic back and has a lot about disability grief and also burnout and found family and what magic really is. So that I've been enjoying. If you want something a little bit more edgy, I did also recently reread the word for World is Forrest by Ursula, which is a really good novella about, it's like Ursula's perspectives on kind of the Vietnam War and also generally on colonialism and exploitation.

Yeah, it's good. It's violent in a cathartic way. It's revolutionists. It's what Star Wars ripped off. It is what Star Wars ripped off. Avatar, I thought. Well, so Star Wars rips it off because Andor is the name of the like city

that the creatures that are totally not Ewox are based out of. They also, are human. Like, it's important that they are, they are kind of described as, like, short teddy bear people, but they are genetically also human. Yeah. I think that just the, like, I don't know, as soon as I realized that their town was called Andor, I was like, this is just literally what the EWox are based on. This is just the word for World of Forest is my favorite Star Wars film

as a kid. Anyway. Anyone got anything to plug here? Alan, you got anything you've been writing? Well, actually, so I, like I said at the beginning, I've been writing fiction forever. I have just manuscripts and manuscripts that are awaiting publication, and I might be getting some good news. There's a really strong possibility that in the next year or two, you will see on the shelves at the independent bookstore near you and certainly not Amazon, the first in a trilogy called Madhatter. So, yeah, we're just waiting for an official announcement, but this is a pre-official announcement that, yeah, my next. sci-fi book, Mad Hatter, should be getting published. Okay. All right.

Well, that's it for Cool Zone Media Book Club this week, and next week we'll bring you more stories. Yay. Thanks. Thanks, y'all. In the heat of battle, your squad relies on you. Don't let them down. Unlock elite gaming tech at Lenovo.com. Dominate every match with next level speed,

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