It Could Happen Here - CZM Book Club: Where the Phph Pebbles Go, by Miriam Allen DeFord

Episode Date: April 26, 2026

Margaret reads you a 1963 science fiction story of class stratification, sports, and first contact.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hello and welcome to the Cool Zone Media Book Club. The only book club where you don't have to do the reading because I do it for you. As always, I'm your host Margaret Kilgime. And this week, we're back to doing pulp sci-fi. But sci-fi, including the pulp stuff, was also the stuff of ideas. And I like it. I like weird, entertaining ways to try and tell ideas.

This week, I'm going to be reading a story from Miriam Allen DeFord, who is a feminist socialist genre writer. She's best known for her science fiction and mystery tales written in the 50s to 70s. but she also wrote for socialist magazines, including the masses, the Liberator, and the Federated Press Bulletin in the 1920s, in addition to doing General Magazine and Copywriting during the Great Depression and World War II. She once said that she was a born feminist

and wrote strongly in support a friend of the pod, the Spanish Republic, and the Spanish Civil War. You can mark your bingo cards now. I have mentioned revolutionary Spain. She also spoke out early against fascism. And I find this interesting because she's not a writer in the socialist world. I mean, she is that too, but she's also just writing pulp for the mainstream pulp magazines. She wrote a number of entries in the Little Blue Book series,

which was like a mail-order series of zines that basically summarized classic and contemporary works of literature or skill sets. She wrote titles for it like Cicero as revealed in his letters and how to write business letters. but also the facts about fascism and the truth about Mussolini, all of which were published in 1925 and 1926. This is a woman after my own heart. I love writing as like, I'm just going to fucking explain some ideas. In a 1938 interview, she's quoted as saying, quote, I am unalterably and actively opposed to fascism, Naziism, Hitlerism, Hirahitoism, or whatever name may be applied to the monster. After the war, she starts pursuing genre fiction more intentionally and writes prolifically, publishing in basically everything. And the story I'm going to read today is one of those.

Today we're doing a story called Where the Pffs Thubbles go. And I want you to note that, yes, you did hear me correctly. Puff is an unpronounceable word spelled P-H-P-H. This story, where the pebbles go, was published in 1963 in the inaugural issue of Worlds of Tomorrow, the exclamation mark is in the magazine's title, alongside authors like Arthur C. Clerk, and we did his story, The Nine Billion Names of God, near the beginning of this show, if you want to go back and hear that. The cover of that magazine is really fun. It has a robot parachuting down into alien mountains.

And the leader line on this story, like, you know, when it's the like, check out the story line is, quote, it was a strange world and a deadly one, the incredible alien planet, which is funny because that's just not really an accurate description of this story at all. This story is about sports and politics and games and aliens and first contact, but it's also a lambast of societal stratification. and social ambition. And it's weird and fun and Miriam's a good writer. So I hope you enjoy it. Where the Puffffuh, Pebbles go. By Miriam Allen DeFord.

Grawl and Haudenoth were playing Puffff. In case you're not a Puff fan, and haven't ever seen Billton's classic ways of improving your Pufff game, its essence consists in lobbying pebbles at a target as near the horizon as your skill permits. After each throw, you fly over to see how far you went. It sounds like a simple game, but it has complicated restrictions and rules,

and a good Pufuf player can command any amount of heavy service from the spectators. Since a lot of the ground dwellers are also Pufuf addicts, they could never become players, of course, being far too small and light to handle the Puff Pettles. This means that a real champion never has to do any kind of work again. being fed, clothed, housed, and entertained by his admirers, and can devote all his time to the game. Grawl and Haudenoth, having alternated as champions for many along Ghanath,

had it pretty easy, but neither of them was given to lying back on his laurels and growing soft. This meant that when a match was announced, ground dwellers as well as we real people, came by the hanthoids from sigils all around to watch through view, tubes, and whichever of the two won piled up a lot of belibs of voluntary service. Voluntary service, as most economists admit, is true wealth, since the pledge is incumbent on the offerer's heirs until it is fully satisfied, and can likewise be willed by the recipient to his heirs. Naturally, no Pufff player is absolutely perfect. If he were, there would be no contest, and nobody would bother to attend a game. Pebbles fall short. They go over.

and sometimes they are thrown so hard that they escape all together from our light gravity and fly into outer space. At the end of the game period, the referee, usually a super annotated former champion, tots up the score and announces how many times each player missed the target and by which of these errors he missed it. By a rather confusing arithmetic computation, he then determines which of them won, and the winner collects his pledges, and the fans collect the side bets they have been making all through the game. In this particular game, Hodeneth won, but then he won about half the time, so that wasn't what

gave it its importance. The ground dwellers, as everyone knows, are an excitable and volatile race. That is why we conquered them so easily, with the added advantage of our command of levitation and our immensely greater size and strength. So just in order to, pefuf game looks like a riot. When anything out of the way occurs, such as the appearance of a new young contender to take on one of the champions, the ground dwellers simply go wild. And this time, they practically exploded. I confess that even we real people were amazed. One of the thinkers was discovered attending the game. Now, when we first arrived here and cleaned up the ground, and established them in their proper subservient position.

The thinkers were our leaders. It was they who figured out the whole invasion, had headed the six-hast-gunned flight, and had worked out the tactics and logistics of the great conquest. But once we were settled and things were going smoothly, they called a last general meeting and told us that their part was finished, and now they were going to retire to the far colony

and go on with their thinking. Since then, if a problem arises that our own counsel can't handle, one of us has to fly to the far colony and obtain the advice of a thinker. They live together there with their families, supported, of course, by all of us, and spend all their time in study and research. It is one of the natural advantages of us real people that we have these specialized thinkers to do all our intellectual and cultural tasks and teach us what we need to know,

leaving us others free for the truly satisfying functions of governance and commerce. Never in all the gunnaths since the last general meeting had a thinker been seen among us, and that so augusta being should condescend to attend a mere buffof game was unbelievable. Yet there he was, easily recognizable naturally, since all thinkers have long white hair and long white beards. even the female thinkers, though some heretics say their beards are artificial. In fact, that is the way one knows that a new thinker has been born.

Soon after birth, his hair and beard begin to grow, both white, and as soon as he has weened, we fly him to the far colony to be reared and educated by his own. If a thinker has a child who isn't one, they send him back to us. As soon as the spectators realized that a thinker was among them,

the excitement reached a boiling point. The ground dwellers almost went crazy. For, of all things, the thinker had seated himself not in the perches of honor of the real people in front, but in the ground dwellers bleachers. We ourselves noticed all us scrambling and heaving, and when some of us flew over to investigate,

we could hardly believe our eyes. When I say scrambling and heaving, I don't mean they were mobbing him. They were much too afraid of us for that, and anyway, their reverence for the thinkers as positively religious, much more so than ours. After all, the thinkers are simply

specialized members of our own race, and though we revere them, we could scarcely worship them as the ground-dwellers do. No, they were clearing a respectful space all around him, but then kept gazing at him in all, half of them falling on their knees in his presence. I sneaked a glance at the Puff players, and as I suspected, they were looking anything but happy. Pufuf champions are pretty vain. They don't care for rival attractions.

One of our party, it was Sephar, who, as usual, pushed himself forward, bowed to the thinker and asked if he wouldn't be more comfortable among us. But he shook his white head and said no. He could see better where he was. I wonder if thinkers may not have a bit of vanity too, and if he wasn't enjoying seeing all those poor creatures prostate themselves around him. Then will your honor join us when the game is over? Persisted Sapphire. If you would enter my poor pit of a dwelling,

it would overwhelm me with pleasure to have you feast with us. His poor pit of a dwelling indeed. I wish you could see the place he lived. the roof opening is plated with solid noch. I was just about bursting with indignation, but I should have known you can trust a thinker to deflate a fellow like that. Thank you, brother, he said mildly,

but I'm here to do some research and I'll have to fly back right after the game. Saffar opened his mouth to argue, but by that time I had him by the wing and I pulled him back. He said rudely, I said firmly. Do you want to give him a little? us a bad name for presumption, brother, I whispered.

Don't interfere with a thinker when he's thinking. Some of the rest of us nodded agreement, so Sephard shut up. But he had a nasty gleam in his eye, and I braced myself for trouble later. We bowed and returned to our places. Thanks to Sephard and his performance, I missed the last throat, Grawl made, which lost him the contest. But I heard the moaned from the spectators who weren't watching the thinker instead. so I knew he'd lobbed a too high one.

It must have been a humdinger, one of the throws into space. I glanced back as I was flying away, and the thinker was standing up and gazing intently after it. Well, I thought to myself, imagine a thinker getting worked up over a poth throw. But, dear listener, we would never get worked up over anything,

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The one who hadn't disappeared was Sephard. He was waiting for me just as I had expected. Not here. I snarled at him. Do you want the ground dwellers to see real people in a brawl? So he adjourned to Marnag's courtyard, which was the nearest dueling place. And it was a nice little fight, and I won.

Quite a group gathered around, and I was pleased to see that several of my friends were making bets on me. Some of Sephar's sycophants lugged him off to the hospital to have a fractured wingtip treated. The rest came home with me, and we spent our winnings on a good dinner with plenty of mastioni, to wash it down. Several of us speculated about the thinker,

and we wondered if his research wasn't a fake, and if he just decided to enjoy a game like the rest of us. After all, Marnag pointed out, he might only be a boy. You can't tell with a thinker. I suppose young thinkers can be frivolous and rebellious, like our own youngsters. Nipar, who is something of a wag, yelled,

Hey, listen to Marnag. He's thinking. Come on, Marnag, are you? you really a thinker in disguise? Let's see if that green hairs of yours has died. You could have shaved the beard. And he poured a picture of Mastioni right over Marnag's head to find out if the color would come off. After that, the party got really rough, and I don't remember the rest of it. A whole ghanoth after that, the thinkers sent one of their messengers to tell us in the council that we were summoned to a meeting in the far colony. That doesn't happen all.

so he knew something extremely important must be up. I, for one, was all of a Twitter. Not one of us connected the summons with that thinker who had come to the Pufufth contest between Grawl and Hodnuth. That was our stupidity. We should have guessed it when we found the two champions had been sent for also.

Grawl flew next to me on the trip, and of all things, both he and Hodnoth were carrying with them several Pothuth pebbles, which the thinkers had ordered them to bring along. It's hard to tell the thinkers apart, at least for us who aren't thinkers, but I recognized the one who had been at the game. He sat right by Heletto, who always acts as their spokesman when we consult them about anything. Welcome and thank you for coming so promptly, Helaldo began.

Did you two plif players bring the pebbles? Graw and Hudnuff handed over the load, and Letto passed it on to the one we knew. This is Mirwin, Ledo said, and he will tell you the urgent thing he is thought. I became interested a long time ago, Mirwin began in the rather rusty voice all the thinkers except Letto have. They spend most their time in study and meditation

and don't talk much among themselves. In a question that seems never to have occurred to any of us, where do foof pebbles go when they are thrown beyond our feeble gravity, and escape into outer space? What becomes of them in the end? And who, if anyone, collects them, and what conclusions about them and our world

to such persons draw? I raised my hand to ask a question, and Merwin nodded. I don't understand, I said politely, meaning he was being too abstruse for all of us, for it is understood that there is no keener apprehension in the council of my own. Is your honor implying that there exists

outside our world other intelligences that would be capable of observing and drawing conclusions from the pebbles? Exactly. I know the general belief is that it is impossible that extraplanetary beings can exist. Least of all intelligent beings. That was the belief of my own colleagues

until I gave them the results of my recent thought. It is the reason we have summoned you here. For some time now, we have been receiving peculiar. peculiar radio waves from outside the world. We have considered them merely manifestations of random radiation from other planets and stars. But now they have suddenly become, shall I say, rhythmical, measured, directional?

They leave the impression that someone or something is trying to communicate with us. The astronomers among us have become more and more concerned. we have finally been led to the reluctant belief that our former theories have been wrong, that this is actually not the only inhabited planet. Now, I need not tell you how disastrous it would be for us if that were true. If there are intelligent beings on other planets, if they are trying to communicate with us, then the next step would be that they would try to visit us.

Marnik raised his hand. What harm would that do if such beings exist if they could come here? Why couldn't we go there too, wherever it is? And wouldn't that enrich our lives? Of course, I'm not a thinker. I had a fleeting vision of Nipar and the pitcher of Mastioni. But I'm a real man, and I can see no reason why it would hurt us to find we are not alone in the universe.

No, said Mirwind dryly. You are not a thinker, my friend. We enjoy here a completely stable civilization. It is the best of all possible social systems. We do not want it disturbed. I see, said Marnag and several others nodded. I confess that a heretical idea crossed my mind, that any such disturbance might dethrone the thinkers first of all.

But I suppressed it. Miron went on. And that is where the fuff pebbles come in. In the course of my researches on these previously unknown waves, I began to wonder what, if anything, had initiated. the interest of outsiders in our planet, assuming that outsiders exist. Certainly we have made no move

toward either trying to reach or communicate with any putative dwellers on other planets. There have been no major changes on our planet that could have enlisted the attention of outside astronomers, even granting that they had telescopes as powerful as our own. Only one thing, as far as I can ascertain, has ever left this planet for outer space. And that was the Puffuffebbles.

We call them pebbles to beans who might consider us giants, and if there really are intelligent beings in other worlds, they might well be of an entirely different size from us, though no less dangerous for all that. They might seem huge meteors. Suppose that, though most of them would undoubtedly burn up, and all of them would be considerably reduced, before they struck another planet as meteorites.

Some of them at least might still be sufficiently large to be analyzed chemically, and suppose that where they struck there existed beings capable of analyzing them. This was getting a little deep for anybody not a thinker to take in. Several council members raised their hands plaintively, and so indicated. All right, I'll try to make it plainer, Mirwin said. Let us pretend that instead of the little first, fragments of space debris that fall harmlessly in the annual meteor showers here, we were pelted with enormous chunks of matter, perhaps causing major damage to property in life.

Wouldn't we immediately undertake an intensive study to determine whence they came, and of what precisely they consisted? And if we found these residual meteorites contained material indicating their origin in an inhabited world, still worse, a world sufficiently evolved to entail the possibility or probability that its highest life forms might be intelligent or even civilized. Wouldn't we take steps at once to investigate? Moreover, wouldn't we be outraged to the point where our primary object would be to avenge ourselves? Of course we would.

And so, of course, would any beings on other planets under similar circumstances? You mean, Marnag asked, that if beings came here from space, they would attack us? That too. But even if that were not their reaction, curiosity alone could be enough to spur them on to exploration. But what could we do? Quavered old Gontes. He's really growing too senile to be on the council much longer. We can discourage them and we can mislead them.

But do you know what? mislead you about anything? The products and services that come to us from beyond the distant stars. Well, they might try to mislead you about anything like the effects of sports gambling. Don't do that. I care about you too much to tell you to do that. But here's the ads. They might come from space.

Who knows? And we're back. How? We can make certain that nothing reaches them in the few. future, which gives them the least sign that any but the lowest forms of life, if even those exist in our world. I studied this whole question systematically, as we always do. I came to the conclusion that only the Pufuf Phevils could possibly betray us. I attended a Puff-Foof game to see for myself if a pebble could actually be thrown with sufficient force to become, as it were,

an artificial meteor. I found that it could. Indeed, I saw Grawl make such a throw. Grawl looked stricken. He fell flat on his face, grovelling before the thinkers. Oh, your reverences, he cried. I never dreamt. I never...

Get up, Grawl, Merwan ordered. Nobody's blaming you. Nobody expects anyone but a thinker to think. We'll make it a rule from now on to hold our shots. We'll bar anyone from the game forever, who lobs a pebble too hard, Hodeneth promised fervently. Far from it, said Merwin. On the contrary, in the future you must concentrate on supergravity shots.

Give extra points to anyone who performs one. Why? several of us murmured, completely bewildered. Because I have already analyzed three pebbles. I brought back with me from the game. With the ones you have brought, I shall be able to make further tests. If they confirm my previous findings, I think we shall be able to mislead any potential attackers.

Every puff-pebble henceforth will be doctored. To use any unauthorized pebble will become a felony. What has happened in the past, we can't change. But there may still be time to save ourselves. From this time forth, there are going to be more meteors shot off our atmosphere than ever before, and every one of them is going to tell a completely false story about conditions in their place of origin. Of course, we may be entirely wrong. These new waves may be due to purely physical causes.

Other planets may be all as devoid of intelligent life as we have always assumed. But if there is the faintest possibility, and I feel there is, that we are in danger, it would be fatal not to take such measures as we can to avert it. What's in the pebbles now that could tell anything about us? Grawl asked. And if something is, how could you alter it? Mervant froze up a little. The thinkers didn't like to have us ask detailed questions.

But he realized that Grawl was still upset, and answered kindly. It wouldn't mean a lot to you if I told you. But you can understand this much. Chemical analysis of the pebbles I've looked at so far show fragments of embedded fossils. Of plants, you mean? Merwin smiled.

Plants don't become fossilized, he said. In one pebble there was a microscopic piece of a metal knife. In another, there was half of a fossilized tooth. ground-dweller relics true but human. You must remember that all the hills around here from which you gather the pebbles are really million gonath old burial places of the ground dwellers.

We haven't bothered to dig up most of them because we're so rich in prehistoric remains with our immensely old civilization that we have all the fossils and ancient artifacts we need. But let's imagine an alien civilization a great deal younger than ours. Let's imagine that an even one of those pebbles, which would be meteorites to them, even a minute trace of that kind of thing should be left. What would they think? For they would have to have thinkers, too, to be civilized at all.

I'll tell you what they'd think. They'd decide that somewhere out in space there is a rich, undiscovered planet full of valuable knowledge and even better valuable artifacts, probably a world with a culture much more advanced than their own, and they'd try hard to trace the direction from which those meteorites came, and to calculate the distance, then suppose they had some means of transportation in space. That may well be what these new radio waves mean. They may be attempts at communication,

If we were foolish enough to respond to them, we don't dare to take any chances. So from now on, there are going to be swarms and swarms of those meteorites, and every one of them is going to be a real artifact on its own, a manufactured one, made according to our specifications, carrying an unmistakable message, a false one. They will be cunningly constructed from forms of, matter injurious to any conceivable variety of life will cover them all. They'll be barren of even the most primitive bacteria. They will carry in themselves a silent warning. Approach the planet from which

these come at peril of your instant death. Not matter what kind of being you are. That should save us forever. I'd been wondering why Safari kept his big mouth shut all this time. To my way of feeling, he should never have been with us at all. He would never have been a council member if he hadn't been a multi-billabere. But I'd won a fair fight with him and officially we had to be friends, so I hadn't protested when I found he was included in the summons. But now the big blowhard had to put his two Groxworth. Your reverence, your honor, he spluttered, may I ask a question? Certainly, brother. Since players have been lobbying pebbles out into space for thousands and thousands of Ghanaths, and as your honor says, some of them must long ago have landed somewhere. Who knows what

dead giveaways may have been in any of them? Is that your question? No, I have too. First, why haven't these intelligent beings whose existence you're presupposing? I saw Merwin's face set and I knew he'd noted the rude and insulting word, but I managed to conceal my smile. Why haven't they come here before this? And since they haven't come, if they're smart enough to figure out our whereabouts, why aren't they also smart enough to realize the difference between the old pebbles and the new ones

and to know we're pulling something over on them? We sometimes say That though the thinkers are of course Overwhelmingly our superiors mentally They lack the emotional control Which is the great characteristic of the rest of us real people I wish those scandal mongers could have seen Mirwin then His face was as white as his beard

And his wings quivered But he let Sephar have his say out And he answered him very quietly As to your first question Brother And if anybody ever called me brother in that tone, I know it was a case of fight or run. The only logical reason is that it must be only recently that such beings have reached a state of culture where they are able to analyze the pebbles and draw the right conclusions from them.

And the answer to your second question is that we can only hope. Hope that all of the pebbles already in their possession are free of, shall we say, incriminating evidence? All we can guarantee is that all they find in the future will be. Does that answer you satisfactorily? It'll have to, muttered Sephard sullenly. I moved away from him and was glad to notice that I was not the only one. What I have said to you, continued the thinker calmly,

you may communicate to any of the real people you wish, but you will naturally keep it from the ground dwellers. there is no reason to agitate them at present. Time enough for that if we should ever need them as soldiers, which I devoutly hope we never shall. But who will make the artificial pebbles of the ground-dwellers aren't to know about them? asked Marnog. What about our slogan, thought from the thinkers,

government and administration from the real people, technical skill and heavy labor from the ground-dwellers? We shall handle that. When you go home, tell Irnig, I want to be able to, want to see him at once. Brief him first. He and his bureau will see that the job is done, and the ground dwellers needn't be told just what they are making.

They'll be delighted to hear we are planning a new kind of puff-f pebble to increase the interest of the game. They love it whenever one is batted, clear away. Well, all of this was Laskinoth. The new pebbles are in use. So far nothing has happened, unless you count the fact that, according to Mirwan, those peculiar radio waves have ceased.

Let us hope that if his whole theory is correct and thinkers don't talk about their thoughts till they're pretty sure of them, those alien beings have given up, decided that they were either mistaken and there is no intelligence here able to communicate, or that they themselves haven't the ability to interpret our answers. Sephard? Oh, he isn't around anymore.

One of the thinkers is doing some experiments in psychological adjustment. Haleido asked the council's recommendation of someone they could commandeer as a test subject, according to the agreement on thinkers' privileges, and I got them to suggest Safar. He was very nasty about it, but I ignored his underbred and vective. I felt it my duty also respectfully to remind Holetto of Safar's past and discretions, in case they'd forgotten. Usually when the thinkers have finished with a subject, he's no longer of much use,

and they put him in a rest home for the remainder of his life. So since I've done pretty well for myself lately, I was able to buy Sephar's home with his knach-plated roof opening and move into it. He had a very attractive wife, who of course couldn't go with him to the Far Colony. It just goes to show that virtue, as one of the thinkers once remarked, wittily, is its own reward. The end. All right. So, there's so much to unpacking this story. and I like it

as a send-up of colonialism primarily, right? Like, this feels like the British Empire. You have these, like,

people who are, like, excited to be brought to court, this, like, upper middle class, the, you know, the minor nobility or whatever,

right? And they're, like, playing all these games with each other where they're, like, angling to try and get their

fucking better knack-covered openings in their roofs or whatever. But the thing that I find most fascinating about this,

there's this concept called the Dark Forest Theory and I first heard about it through a series of books called The Three Body Problem by I think Chicksin Liu is a Chinese author who is very right wing and it's really funny that people are like oh these books they're so they are absolutely fundamentally fascistic they're interesting and they're really interesting sci-fi and I'm not telling people not to read them I actually am glad that they're available in English and I enjoyed reading them but they absolutely present a very, very dark version of the world and one in which like feelings and emotions in

particular are going to get us killed. And specifically because of this idea called the dark forest problem where if you believe in some Hobbesian bullshit about what the world is like, where everyone is trying to kill each other all of the time and only the veneer of civilization and camaraderie and affinity of like fellow civilized people is what stops them from doing it, you never want to let aliens know you exist because if you let an alien know you exist, you have to kill them. Like there's this idea that like they logiced it out,

that if the only logical solution is that if any creature in the dark forest, because we're all jaguars wandering around the forest, if any other creature is there, you have to kill them immediately and mercilessly, even before you learn how to communicate with them. And that is the basis of the entire, trilogy of books. And I love that someone made fun of the three-body problem like 30 or 40 years before the three-body problem was written. That rules and that it was a woman doing it, a socialist

woman. So, yeah, of course the British Empire-ass people think, obviously if they're aliens, they would act just like us. And since we conquer the ground dwellers, obviously, you know, the only thing we can do is hide. So that's why I like that story. Also, I am a sucker for like kind of a send-up of making up new words, you know, where they're just like, ah, they're just don't make fake-ass sci-fi words like they used to. Anyway, that's all for today.

And, yeah, I'm Margaret Kiljoy. You can find me on the internet. And one last thing, next week, the very week from now, unless you're listening in the future, in which case not a week from now, but some unknown number of Ghanoths in the past or whatever, next week, I'm not going to do the reading for you for Book Club. You're going to do the reading ahead of time. It's going to be like school. Everybody loves school. It's going to be like a regular book club in a way. We are going to be like a regular book club in a way. We are going to be. to be reading two short stories by the anarchist maven ursul k leguin and hazel and i who helps with this podcast want to hear what you think about these stories if you go onto reddit onto the it could happen here subreddit there's a thread for whatever you post i don't know how to use reddit i'm mostly just lurk there there's a post and it's like hey put your thoughts about these stories and i'm going to be talking with some other cool zone media people about these stories the two stories that we're going to be reading

One is the absolute classic. You should just read it anyway. It's just like a foundational piece of science fiction. The ones who walked away from Omelas, and it is really short, I promise you. We're also going to read the story, the day before the revolution. And both of these are pretty easily Googledable. I believe they're both on Anarchist Library, which is a website with anarchist texts. And if you're ever like, Margaret keeps calling Le Guin in Anarchist.

She didn't call herself an anarchist all that much. She personally gave me permission directly to me that anarchist can claim her and that she would be honored. So I'm going to keep claiming her. And anyway, okay, go read those stories. We'll talk about them. We'll share some of your thoughts. And yeah, go to the subreddit. It could happen here.

There's links to the stories or just Google them or honestly duck, duck go to them. That's what I would recommend. I'm rambling. Fuck ice. Take care of each other. build spare rooms, hidden spaces in your walls. Bye, everyone. It could happen here is a production of Coolzone Media.

For more podcasts from Coolzone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeard radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.

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