Somewhere in Thailand, a mind-controlled ant climbs a tree. She moves in jerks and starts, her body no longer her own. Alone, she staggers to the underside of a leaf, and bites the thick central stem. Her jaw locks. Her chitin bulges and bursts. A long gray tendril rises from within, unfurls to three times her length, and pops to release a cloud of spores. Away on the breeze the spores float, to possess any other ants unlucky enough to remain within the blast radius.
The fungus is called Ophiocordyceps camponoti-balzani. The fungus infects an ant, takes over the victim’s brain, forces it to move to a high place near other ants–a place where spores will spread–and explodes.
That’s real.
If you work for a corporation or a non-profit, you’re part of a functionally immortal entity whose life is governed by laws more theological than biological—a being that draws strength from desire,
faith, and sacrifice. When corporations emerged in the High Middle Ages, jurists compared them to angels: immortal, immaterial, mighty. And every angel is terrifying.
That’s real, too.
You read these words on a screen lit by lightning, which we harnessed either by burning hundred-million-year-old plants and plankton (and a few dinosaurs), by wrestling rivers like Achilles, by binding the wind or the shifting tide or sunlight or subterranean fire. Building your screen required labors that would make Hercules blanch.
How can we tell stories about that kind of world? A world that’s not straightforward, a world with diversities of wonder, justice, injustice, horror, majesty, and sheer scale to beggar the wildest opium dreams?
We can tell some stories by zooming in. The earth seems flat to most human beings, most of the time. Newtonian physics works fine for objects about the size of people, moving at people speeds. A character who calls her former lover to console him after his father’s death doesn’t need to think about cellular towers, satellites, digital audio, or call routing, let alone the Chinese mine that produced the rare earths used to make the phone (and the people who worked there). By focusing on dramatic structures of everyday life and emotional politics that haven’t changed much since Murasaki wrote Genji, a storyteller can avoid much of reality’s weirdness.
Or the teller can embrace the strange. Break open the common surface of our lives and expose the machinery beneath. Show characters who engage with the mad mess of their setting, who are elevated by it or ground to dust or both. Pull out elements of our daily weird, hold them to the light, and watch them spark.
Some people accuse fantastic literature–science fiction, fantasy, horror, and all their permutations–of escapism. And sure, some of us come to genre tales for the rich fantasy lives, for the grand open vistas and the capital-E Evils which Must Be Stopped. But I think the richness of the genre lies in confrontationalism, not escapism: its ability to address the fundamental strangeness of the natural world, and the world we’ve built, and the world being built around us. The freedom to tell stories out of this world can offer the freedom to name more precisely the world where we live.
And that world is wild, and needs naming.
——————————————————-
About the Author:
MAX GLADSTONE went to Yale, where he wrote a short story that became a finalist in the Writers of the Future competition. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
About the Book:
A god has died, and it’s up to Tara, first-year associate in the international necromantic firm of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao, to bring Him back to life before His city falls apart. Her client is Kos, recently deceased fire god of the city of Alt Coulumb. Without Him, the metropolis’s steam generators will shut down, its trains will cease running, and its four million citizens will riot.
Tara’s job: resurrect Kos before chaos sets in. Her only help: Abelard, a chain-smoking priest of the dead god, who’s having an understandable crisis of faith. When Tara and Abelard discover that Kos was murdered, they have to make a case in Alt Coulumb’s courts—and their quest for the truth endangers their partnership, their lives, and Alt Coulumb’s slim hope of survival.
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Guest Post: “Freedom to Name” by Max Gladstone (Three Parts Dead)
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Somewhere in Thailand, a mind-controlled ant climbs a tree. She moves in jerks and starts, her body no longer her own. Alone, she staggers to the underside of a leaf, and bites the thick central stem. Her jaw locks. Her chitin bulges and bursts. A long gray tendril rises from within, unfurls to three times her length, and pops to release a cloud of spores. Away on the breeze the spores float, to possess any other ants unlucky enough to remain within the blast radius.
The fungus is called Ophiocordyceps camponoti-balzani. The fungus infects an ant, takes over the victim’s brain, forces it to move to a high place near other ants–a place where spores will spread–and explodes.
That’s real.
If you work for a corporation or a non-profit, you’re part of a functionally immortal entity whose life is governed by laws more theological than biological—a being that draws strength from desire,
faith, and sacrifice. When corporations emerged in the High Middle Ages, jurists compared them to angels: immortal, immaterial, mighty. And every angel is terrifying.
That’s real, too.
You read these words on a screen lit by lightning, which we harnessed either by burning hundred-million-year-old plants and plankton (and a few dinosaurs), by wrestling rivers like Achilles, by binding the wind or the shifting tide or sunlight or subterranean fire. Building your screen required labors that would make Hercules blanch.
How can we tell stories about that kind of world? A world that’s not straightforward, a world with diversities of wonder, justice, injustice, horror, majesty, and sheer scale to beggar the wildest opium dreams?
We can tell some stories by zooming in. The earth seems flat to most human beings, most of the time. Newtonian physics works fine for objects about the size of people, moving at people speeds. A character who calls her former lover to console him after his father’s death doesn’t need to think about cellular towers, satellites, digital audio, or call routing, let alone the Chinese mine that produced the rare earths used to make the phone (and the people who worked there). By focusing on dramatic structures of everyday life and emotional politics that haven’t changed much since Murasaki wrote Genji, a storyteller can avoid much of reality’s weirdness.
Or the teller can embrace the strange. Break open the common surface of our lives and expose the machinery beneath. Show characters who engage with the mad mess of their setting, who are elevated by it or ground to dust or both. Pull out elements of our daily weird, hold them to the light, and watch them spark.
Some people accuse fantastic literature–science fiction, fantasy, horror, and all their permutations–of escapism. And sure, some of us come to genre tales for the rich fantasy lives, for the grand open vistas and the capital-E Evils which Must Be Stopped. But I think the richness of the genre lies in confrontationalism, not escapism: its ability to address the fundamental strangeness of the natural world, and the world we’ve built, and the world being built around us. The freedom to tell stories out of this world can offer the freedom to name more precisely the world where we live.
And that world is wild, and needs naming.
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Shaun Duke
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A Reading List of Dystopian Fiction and Relevant Texts (Apropos of Nothing in Particular)
Why would someone make a list of important and interesting works of dystopian fiction? Or a suggested reading list of works that are relevant to those dystopian works? There is absolutely no reason other than raw interest. There’s nothing going on to compel this. There is nothing in particular one making such a list would hope you’d learn. The lists below are not an exhaustive list. There are bound to be texts I have forgotten or texts you think folks should read that are not listed. Feel free to make your own list and tell me about it OR leave a comment. I’ll add things I’ve missed! Anywhoodles. Here goes:
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Duke’s Best EDM Tracks of 2024
And so it came to pass that I finished up my annual Best of EDM [Insert Year Here] lists. I used to do these on Spotify before switching to Tidal, and I continued doing them on Tidal because I listen to an absurd amount of EDM and like keeping track of the tunes I love the most. Below, you will find a Tidal playlist that should be public. You can listen to the first 50 tracks right here, but the full playlist is available on Tidal proper (which has a free version just like Spotify does). For whatever reason, the embedded playlist breaks the page, and so I’ve opted to link to it here and at the bottom of this post. Embeds are weird. Or you can pull songs into your preferred listening app. It’s up to you. Some caveats before we begin:
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2025: The Year of Something
We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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