I'm in the home stretch of my 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PDX THIS FRIDAY (June 20) at BARNES AND NOBLE with BUNNIE HUANG and at the TUALATIN public library on SUNDAY (June 22). After that, it's LONDON (July 1) with TRASHFUTURE'S RILEY QUINN and then a big finish in MANCHESTER on July 2.
Margaret Killjoy writes fantasy stories of relentless tension, boundless wonder, thrilling adventure…and completely radical, unflinching anarchist politics. Her 2024 YA novel "The Sapling Cage" is a queer coming-of-age epic that motors with all the narrative energy of a genderbent Conan epic:
Today, Strangers In a Tangled Wilderness Press publishes The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice, a collection of three linked short stories set in Killjoy's celebrated Danielle Cain series, which Alan Moore called "ideal reading for a post-truth world":
Danielle Cain is a freight-train-hopping, anarcho-queer hero whose adventures are shared by solidaristic crews of spellcasting, cryptid-battling crustypunk freaks and street-fighters. In Immortal Choir, the action opens with Danielle and a motley band around a campfire in a dark Idaho woods, surrounded by the night-screams of some distant demonic presence. It's Samhain, and the veil between the realm of the living and the dead is as thin as it gets. Bad things are stalking the night.
To save themselves, they must court their own dead, welcoming them to their circle. They pile a camp-plate high with food for the dead to eat, build the fire up, and begin the tell the stories of their dead comrades, summoning them as a defense against the monstrous forces that stalk the All Saints night. This is the setup for the three linked short stories that make up this short book.
This is a great setup: a group of endangered comrades, huddled together against the darkness without, telling tales to buoy up their bravery. It's the framing device that makes The Decameron an enduring classic after 800 years and counting. In Killjoy's hands, it sings.
The first story is "The Troll King's Court," a ghost story about a Norwegian troll cult that came to America in a failed Manhattan-Adjacent Project to create a mystical superweapon with which to win WWII. It's ultimately a story about how the competent people who have their shit together in our lives are just as broken as the rest of us, and about the many ways that release, fulfillment and actualization can take place. It's spooky as fuck.
The middle story is "The Fairies of the Spring," which summons up the old, mean roots of the Fair Folk, the cruelty behind their beauty and merry laughter. Pratchett did one of these (Lords and Ladies), and so have many others – but no one's done it where the resistance comes from a motley band of queer punk club-owners in a rural town, who team up with local shitkickers to hunt the elves and banish them to their realm.
The final tale is "The Battle of Miami," a story about a streetfighting anti-globalist battle. It's a tale of Black Bloc tactics and true queer love, that lights up with joy.
Killjoy's really onto something with this series. She's tapping into the deep roots of fantasy – maybe the socialist parables woven into William Morris's stories. She's also connecting with the roots of urban fantasy (I was delighted to see a reference to Terri Windling's superb, absolutely amazing Borderland series).
These three tales stand alone, so there's no need to read the previous volumes before diving into this one. But you should read the other two, because they're great:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
The last thing I posted from Margaret (Magpie) Killjoy did well on here, and I'm really hoping this takes off too.
I've mentioned her podcasts (Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff and Live Like the World is Dying), but realized I might have neglected to mention her books. First you've got her Danielle Cain series about anarchists having magical and demonic adventures in forgotten corners of the US as they run one step ahead of the law.
(link here)
The Sapling Cage. I actually haven't read this one yet.
Brooke:
Margaret, you’re the optimistic one today. What do we do? What do we do in this terrible world?
Margaret:
We build resilient communities, network them together, teach each other things, try to limit the amount of gatekeeping we do within those communities. We value conflict resolution as high as we can. We value survival skills and more traditional forms of preparedness, and we support a diversity of actions against all of the negative things that are happening in the world, whether or not we believe those actions are strategic. We support any action that falls within our bounds of ethics, including people who are like annoying church liberals, or people who are like taking things too far with the gasoline and the timers made out of kitchen timers. We support the wide range of it and we try to live our lives as best we can. We recognize that winning is not a condition. It’s not like a win state, right? There’s not a state in which we win. But instead, there’s a reason we say, "Winning at life." We don’t say, "Won at life." We say that we are in the process of winning. And when we fight, and when we build, and when we love one another we win. We live the best lives that we can despite everything that’s happening and we work really hard to help other people live the best lives that they can. Was that a rhetorical question? I’m not sure.
Brooke:
No, I do feel a little bit…No, honestly, I feel a little bit better now. I really do. Love wins. We win with love. Love and care. And the thing that goes on if me being me as a nurturing, loving person.
Inmn:
In living like we’re preparing for the world to die, should we also live like the empire could be dying?
Margaret:
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, like, capitalism has proved a sturdy beast, but it can certainly be slain. And if anything can slay it, it is the nightmare that is coming, that we will all figure out how to come together to handle. Yay.
from the latest ep of Live Like the World is Dying
If sf asks, “what if the machine had a different social arrangement?” then steampunk asks, “what would it be like if we could have the productive benefits of machines without their regimentation?”
A craft worker enjoys enormous autonomy. If they get a cramp or need a bathroom break, they can just stop. If they’re hungry, they can eat. If the landscape outside the window is looking especially picturesque, they can stop and contemplate it, or even step out into the fresh air to enjoy it.
Even the most labor-friendly, cooperatively owned assembly line can’t function if its workers do their own thing. The price of factory efficiency is autonomy: a worker in a multi-stage process has other workers upstream and downstream depending on them to maintain the pace and regimentation of the line.
Steampunk is fantasy in that it imagines lone craftspeople working with all the autonomy of the individual mad scientist inventor or tinkerer, but producing goods characteristic of the factories where workers had to check their autonomy at the door.
That’s a utopian vision, one that was especially enticing in the 2000s, when internet collaboration tools allowed thousands of strangers to engage in large, collective endeavors, like writing an encylopedia or an operating system, without any bosses, working at their own pace, relying on version control systems and wiki pages to coordinate their labor while they worked their tools in their crafters’ cottages all over the world.
This is truly the opposite of steampunk. Somehow, our bosses have invented a form of craft-labor — where you work from your own vehicle or home, using equipment you pay for — that has all the humiliations, dangers and petty authoritarianism of the industrial factory.
This is the worst of both worlds. Under the New Deal, factory workers teamed up with progressive regulators to force the owners of giant factories to share the efficiency gains of the assemblyline, creating the “Large-Firm Wage Premium” (where workers at big companies made more money, not less).
Today, the large-firm wage premium is dead. Workers are moving out of the factory, back into their homes (and cars), but those homes and cars are being transformed into factories, thanks to the camera- and mic-studded digital devices that monitor workers more closely than even the meanest, pettiest foreman could.
It needn’t be this way. The Luddites presaged the steampunks, imagining technology to liberate, not to enslave. Technological tools could be labor organizers’ secret weapons, shifting power back towards workers.
Podcasting "Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk"
This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, “Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk,” about the worst-of-all-worlds created by bossware, where an app is your boss, and you live at work because your home and/or car is a branch office of the factory:
As with so much of my work these days, the column opens with a reference to the Luddites, and to Brian Merchant’s superb, forthcoming history of the Luddite uprisings, “Blood in the Machine”:
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
As Merchant explains, the Luddites were anything but technophobes: they were skilled high-tech workers whose seven-year apprenticeships were the equivalent to getting a Master’s in Engineering from MIT. Their objection to powered textile machines had nothing to do with fear of the machines: rather, it was motivated by a clear-eyed understanding of how factory owners wanted to use the machines.
The point of powered textile machines wasn’t to increase the productivity of skilled textile workers — rather, it was to smash the guilds that represented these skilled workers and ensured that they shared in the profits from their labor. The factory owners wanted machines so simple a child could use them — because they were picking over England’s orphanages and recruiting small children through trickery to a ten-year indenture in the factories.
The “dark, Satanic mills” of the industrial revolution were awash in the blood and tears of children. These child-slaves were beaten and starved, working long hours on little sleep for endless years, moving among machines that could snatch off a limb, a scalp, even your head, after a moment’s lapse in attention.
(Fun fact: in 1832, Robert Blincoe, one of children who survived the factories, published “A Memoir of Robert Blincoe, an Orphan Boy” a bestseller recounting the horrors he endured; that book inspired Charles Dickens to write Oliver Twist):
It wasn’t just that weavers who belonged to guilds made more money — they also enjoyed more dignity in their workplaces, because those workplaces were their homes. Textiles were the original “cottage industries,” in that it was done in cottages, by families who set their own pace, enjoying amiable conversation or companionable silence.
These weavers could go to the bathroom when they wanted, eat when they wanted, take a break and walk around outside when the weather was fine.
This is in stark contrast to life in the dark, Satanic mills, where foremen watched over every movement, engaging in a kind of meanspirited choreography that treated the worker as an inferior adjunct to the machine, to be fit to its workings and worked to its tireless schedule.
The Luddites had some technical critiques of the machines — they argued, correctly, that those early machines turned out inferior products that fit poorly and degraded quickly. But even if the machines had produced textiles to match the hand-looms, the Luddites’ real anger wasn’t over what the machines did — it was over who the machines did it to and who they did it for.
I’ve written that “Science Fiction is a Luddite literature” — it’s a narrative form that can go beyond describing what a machine does, to demanding that we rethink who it does it for and who it does it to. Not all sf does this, but at its best, this is secret sauce that makes sf such a radical form, one that insists that while the machines’ functioning may be deterministic, their social arrangements are up to us:
That’s what happens when you mix Luddism with SF — but what happens when you mix it with fantasy? I think you get steampunk.
Steampunk has many different valences, but central to the project is an imaginary world where people engaged in craft labor (lone mad scientists, say) are able to produce high-tech goods that are more associated with factories. I think it’s no coincidence that steampunk took root during the first surge of “peer-based commons production” — when craft workers were producing whole operating systems and encyclopedias from their “cottages”:
These modern craft workers were living the steampunk fantasy, so beautifully summed up in the motto for Magpie Killjoy’s Steampunk Magazine: “Love the Machine, Hate the Factory.”
But then came the second decade of the 21st century, and now the third, and with it, the rise of something very much like the opposite of that steampunk fantasy: a new form of craft labor where the factory is inside the cottage — where an app is your boss, and “work from home” becomes “live at work.”
As with all forms of technological oppression, this movement followed the “Shitty Technology Adoption Curve,” starting with people with little social clout and working its way up the privilege gradient to entangle a widening proportion of workers.
Among the first people to experience this was the predominantly Black, predominantly female employees of Arise, a work-from-home call center business that pretends that its employees are small businesses themselves, and so charges them to get trained for each new client, then fines them if they want to quit:
In Amazon warehouses and delivery vans, we saw the rise of “chickenized reverse-centaurs” — these are workers who must pay for their own work equipment (as with poultry farmers captured by processing monopolists, hence “chickenized”). They are also paired with digital technology (something automation theorists call a “centaur”) but the technology bosses them around, rather than supporting them. The machine is the centaur’s head and the worker is its body (thus, “reverse-centaur”):
The pandemic lockdowns saw an explosion in the use of bossware, technology that monitors your every keystroke, every click, every URL, every file, even the video and audio from the cameras and mics on your devices, whether or not you pay for those devices.
This is the second coming of Taylorism, the fine-grained, high-handed “scientific” micromanagement of factory workers, transposed to the home, and integrated with sensors that track you down to your eyeballs:
Truly, this is the worst of all worlds. We increasingly work for large, distributed factories, and unlike the big companies of the post-New Deal era, we don’t have unions and progressive regulators who can force these big businesses to share the wealth in the form of the “large firm wage premium.”
Instead, we have craft labor at sweatshop wages, under factory conditions, in our own homes and cars. This needn’t be: digital technologies are powerful labor-organizing tools (potentially), but that’s not how we’ve decided to use them:
As the radical message of sf tells us, that’s a choice, not an inevitability. We aren’t prisoners of technology. We can seize the means of computation. It starts by being less concerned with what the machine does, and homing in on who it does it for and who it does it to.
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[Image ID: A woodcut of a weaver's loft, where a woman works at a hand-loom. Out of the window opposite her looms the glowing, menacing red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' On the wall behind her is the poster from Magpie Killjoy's 'Steampunk Magazine' that reads, 'Love the machine, hate the factory.']
The factory owners who built their “dark, Satanic mills” weren’t interested in making life easier for textile workers by automating their labor. They wanted to make workers’ lives harder.
Textile machines were valued because they were easier to operate than the hand-looms that preceded them, and that meant that workers who wanted a fair wage for a fair day’s work could be fired and replaced with new workers, without the logistical hassle of the multi-year apprenticeship demanded by the hand-loom and its brethren.
As Brian Merchant documents in Blood in the Machine, his stunning, forthcoming history of the Luddites, the factory owners of the industrial revolution wanted machines so simple that children could work them, because that would let them pick over England’s orphanages, tricking young kids to come work in their factories for ten and twelve hour days.
These children were indentured for a period of ten years, starved and mercilessly beaten when they missed quota. The machines routinely maimed or killed them. One of these children, Robert Blincoe, survived to write a bestselling memoir detailing the horrifying life of the factory owners’ child slaves, inspiring Dickens to write Oliver Twist.
This ethic of technophilia, labor autonomy, solidarity and loose coordination was beautifully summed up in the motto for Magpie Killjoy’s wonderful Steampunk Magazine:
