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@plausible-fabulist
August 15 & 16 near Chicago, Mary Anne Mohanraj & I are teaching a mini-workshop for the Speculative Literature Foundation -- a bunch of short talks, seminars, excercises, with time to write, connect and re-energize your writing praxis. Check it out: https://speculativeliterature.org/register/summer-mini-workshop/
Someone sent me lovely fan mail on Tumblr for The Ghost and the Golem and I attempted to reply to it privately but then Tumblr was like "you're too late!" Uh, rude, Tumblr. Not that I really understand how to operate the Tumblrtron. Anyway, if you wrote me a note about how you liked TG&TG and I didn't reply, that's why and I appreciate you!
MRAH Episode 73
Ep 73 out now, from me & @maryannemohanraj , about the anxiety of influence, the glee of influence & even, the anxiety of *lack* of influence... & everything else that entered our lovely & distractible little heads, of course.
Come write SF & F with us
with me & Mary Anne Mohanraj. May 30-June 3rd in Oak Park IL, near Chicago — wonderful food, special guests, wonderful conversations, time to write and/or critiques! https://speculativeliterature.org/register/writing-sf-and-fantasy/
Register now. Deadline to apply is Wednesday!
People love to say things like “Hiding Anne Frank was illegal, turning her in would have been legal” without like fully grasping the modern implications properly. You have tons of folks like “if WW2 happened today id have __” that do not realize what is happening around them.
We have this idolized AND sanitized version of what happened then, and so we do not recognize it when it happens now.
Resistance fighters assassinated nazis and blew up weapons and infrastructure and destroyed records and forged paperwork and raised secret funds and smuggled people in vehicles and yes, hid them in their homes.
“Well it’s sad he got sent to an ICE camp but he faked his permit :/“
Whoever helped him fake his paperwork did what fighters in ww2 did. People who cut through chain link fences do what fighters in ww2 did, people who blow whistles chasing after ice cars do what fighters in ww2 did, people who destroy arms factories and cop city cranes do what fighters in ww2 did, people unmask agents do what fighters in ww2 did.
People are doing it now! They’ve been doing it now! You keep saying “oh if this happened here__” it HAS! It IS!
What are you doing about it?
As someone on the front lines of the court system, I’m confirming this. It’s easy to assume that people are being hyperbolic. They’re not. People in the courthouse for speeding tickets and child support are being strongarmed into locked rooms and arrested, loaded into vans under tents behind the courthouse, and they built a fence with netting over it to prevent reporters and court watchers from photographing faces.
One local jail contracted with ICE voluntarily. We were getting close to forcing them to actually follow the rules of ICE detainers and release people if ICE hadn’t come for them. That’s over now. If anyone gets bond on a pending criminal charge, they are arrested and deported without the chance to prove innocence or guilt.
Two of my clients were victims of severe domestic violence. Nearly all have dependent children. Some of the children are US citizens. There are no questions. No support. Give your kids to CPS — this is the only option.
You know undocumented people can get a driver’s license? They can file taxes and get a tax ID? Those, the ones who tried to obey the law, are being taken out one by one, because their names are in a database that they voluntarily joined. Because they want to be here. They want to be Americans.
The judge in a case of mine gave someone a two-day jail sentence. Gone. Case deferrals for dismissal are available for all Americans; if an undocumented person tries to take the same deal, they’re gone. A child client of mine had his father disappear to ICE. A woman had her husband disappear.
It’s now. Detainees kept in horrible conditions, unfed, unwashed, no lawyers, no doctors. It’s now. Shipped to countries where they’ve never been and left without papers. It’s now. It’s now. It’s happening now. It’s happening now.
I’m teaching this spring, online and IRL...
This spring I'm teaching three online courses for Clarion West Online @clarionwest, and one week-long workshop for the Speculative Literature Foundation!
Profligacy: An Idea Jam March 15, 2026 | Online | 9:30—11:30AM PT 2 hours. Techniques to bust through self-censorious scarcity. SO many ideas.
Breaking the Rules March 29, 2026 | Online | 9:30—11:30AM PT Show don’t tell. Keep your point of view consistent. Beware the dreaded infodump. Protagonists must protag. Don’t tell Bob things he already knows. IT'S TIME TO BREAK THEM ALL.
Writing is Half the Story: the Theory and Praxis of Being Critiqued April 26, 2026 | Online | 9:300-10:30AM PT All we did was put some words in order: it's the reader who forges them into a story. What if we took this radical idea seriously? How can we glimpse the crucible of the reader's mind?
...and save the date for... Speculative Literature Foundation One-Week Writing Workshop IRL in Oak Park, IL May 30 – June 3, 2026 with Benjamin Rosenbaum and Mary Anne Mohanraj @maryannemohanraj-blog
Yeah I said something similar yesterday but we can NOT let what happened to Renee Good cloud what happened to everyone else at the hands of these SS Demons!!!
Because we can’t disregard one person if we’re for human rights!
My 43-year-old son, Keith, was tragically killed on New Year's Eve in Northri… Keith Porter needs your support for Support for Keith’s Daugh
The above screenshot reads:
A Black man was killed by ICE (off duty) in Los Angeles on New Year's Eve. And like Renee Good, he was an American citizen. But most people have not heard about Keith Porter. I need y'all to realize this. Black people experience this lack of visibility all the time when it comes to being victims. (Christopher Webb @cwebbonline.com)
The second screenshot above reads:
Renee Nicole Good wasn't the first killed by ICE... In 2025, ICE murdered: Silverio Villegas Gonzalez Carlos Roberto Montoya Valdez Genry Ruiz Guillén Serawit Gezahagn Dejane Maksym Chernyak Juan Alexis Tineo-Martinez Brayan Garzón-Rayo Nhon Ngoc Nguyen Marie Ange Blaise Abelardo Avellaneda Delgado Jesus Molina-Veya Johnny Noviello Isidro Pérez Tien Xuan Phan Chaofeng Ge Lorenzo Antonio Batrez Vargas Oscar Rascon Duarte Norlan Guzman-Fuentes Miguel Ángel García Medina Johnny Noviello Santos Banegas Reyes Ismael Ayala-Uribe Norlan Guzman-Fuentes Miguel Ángel García Medina Huabing Xie Leo Cruz-Silva Hasan Ali Moh’D Saleh Josué Castro Rivera Gabriel Garcia Aviles Kai Yin Wong Francisco Gaspar-Andrés Pete Sumalo Montejo Shiraz Fatehali Sachwani Jean Wilson Brutus Fouad Saeed Abdulkadir Delvin Francisco Rodriguez Nenko Stanev Gantchev In 2026, ICE has murdered 2 people: Keith Porter [New years eve 2025] Renee Nicole Good -From the ICE_Raids Community on Reddit
And to all of our lovely WWC Followers, particularly those in the United States:
Take care. Take care of each other, your community, yourselves.
Travel in groups and make sure your loved ones know where you are. And absolutely know your rights.
And even in troubled times, try to find a spark of hope, creativity and comfort and hold onto it. For even joy is resistance.
Resources
Immigrant Defense Project
City of Mpls website: Know Your Rights (Minnesota)
For those who can support:
I've included the verified GoFundMe for Keith Porter's daughters.
Keith Porter's family GoFundme
~Mod Colette & WWC Team
Writers when it's time to write the story no one forced them to come up with in the first place 🙄
Awards Elgibility Post 2025
For 2025: "Regarding the Childhood of Morrigan, Who Was Chosen to Open the Way" at Reactor: https://reactormag.com/regarding-the-childhood-of-morrigan-benjamin-rosenbaum/
People are always like "critic of capitalism? and yet I note that you're posting this with an iPhone"
but somehow they're never like "critic of socialism? and yet I note that you're posting this via the internet"
or
"critic of anarchism? and yet i note that you're posting this via Linux severs"
Sophia Babai guest-hosts the Mohanraj and Rosenbaum are Humans podcast! https://speculativeliterature.org/ep-68-show-notes/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXGK6y1Eilk
a sampling of Speculative Fiction that plays with gender in interesting ways:
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (of course. also see her short stories set in the same setting: "Winter's King" and "Coming of Age in Karhide")
Terra Ignota series by Ada Palmer (25th century science fiction where humanity has supposedly entered a post-gender era. gender in reality hasn't been *completely* stamped out however [though it does certainly seem to bear less influence than today]. and yet our narrator's attempts to assign genders to other characters, apparently in fitting with his emulation of the literature of the Enlightenment, themselves show an understanding of gender rather different from either those of that past or our present. fascinating world-building in general informed by Palmer's work as a historian! she once said in an interview that her aim was essentially a world as alien to us now as we would be to people of the 17th and 18th centuries. i think it's a rather successful attempt.)
The Unraveling by Benjamin Rosenbaum (incredibly underappreciated! creates a gender binary that feels self-consistent but doesn't map onto the binary of women and men. far-future, posthuman society with a culture of high mutual surveillance, multiple bodies per individual, interesting religious world-building, discussion of "stagnation" of a society, etc. very dense and rich worldbuilding packed, in a skilled, not-at-all info-dumping manner, into a single stand-alone novel. the title reflects the book's plot well in multiple respects)
Walking Practice by Dolki Min (centers an alien stranded on earth who kills humans in order to eat after luring them into sexual engagements. lots of meditation on the reliance on gender to construct personhood, and the depersonalization that goes hand-in-hand with unintelligibility / failure to perform gender correctly. predictably quite bloody. protagonist's body [when not carefully and with great effort held in human form] is vague but clearly not-at-all human. a disability reading is also very appropriate and enlightening for much of the work. translated from the Korean into English by Victoria Caudle, and judging by the translator's note Dolki Min seems to have done some quite interestingly experimental work with the original grammar to communicate the protagonist's alienness. in the English translation, this effect is instead accomplished chiefly through typography.)
The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov (rather dated - especially in that it falls into the trap that The Unraveling avoids in allowing its genders to be [I would say] too understandable through the lens of men and women, but its three gender alien society may still be of interest. very biologically non-human aliens. note however that they're chiefly only the focus of the middle [though probably longest] third. unrelatedly, i personally love the descriptions of lunar society in the last third.)
"I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" by Isabel Fall (takes a lazy comment popularly used to undermine transgender identities and brilliantly uses it as a springboard to interrogate the relationship between gender and violence, the use of gender as a tool of the state, the question of how to reckon with one's *own* identity simultaneously being dearly important to oneself and yet also a tool of the state/deeply intertwined with, involving, and even necessitating harmful ideologies and practices/something that itself urgently needs to be interrogated, etc. the description of what the narrator loved about womanhood as they saw/experienced it - centered around complete self-control and power for self-invention and re-invention [which then transitions into their new gender as a mechanical thing i think] is also fascinating.)
#thanksfortheshoutout
If you want to hang out with me & @maryannemohanraj-blog in Chicago the first week in August to write, talk about stories, critique manuscripts, and think about Science Fiction & Fantasy together, we're leading a SF/F workshop for the Speculative Literature Foundation. You can apply here: https://speculativeliterature.org/register/writing-sf-and-fantasy/ (Week-long retreat with writing time, talks, & field trip is $400; workshop with group critique of manuscripts up to 8k words is $750; includes lunch, you're on your own for dinner & housing.)
I guess it's some consolation that the AI that ends the world won't ACTUALLY be a malevolent superintelligence, it'll just be cosplaying a malevolent superintelligence because it read a lot of bad science fiction.
I've got 99 problems and every one of them is a Luftballoon
Going for Broke
If you have friends who would like to try out roleplaying games but are daunted by hefty rules & dice & a 3-4 hour time commitment, maybe go back Avery Alder's Going For Broke (https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/buried-without-ceremony/going-for-broke-a-sitcom-game-about-making-rent), a punk house sitcom game based on a deck of cards that takes a half hour to play and barely any time to explain. You can read the rules for free here: https://buriedwithoutceremony.com/gfb
On the latest episode of "A Meal of Thorns", ARB's critical book-club, author and game designer Benjamin Rosenbaum joins editor Jake Casella Brookins to discuss Laurie J. Marks' FIRE LOGIC, first in an inventive and subversive fantasy series: https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2025/02/10/a-meal-of-thorns-17-fire-logic-with-benjamin-rosenbaum/
