Media Glutton, March 26, 2008

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by Rick Dakan

So I had a rather unusual but quite exciting media overload experience this past weekend - spoke and worked my publisher's table at the San Francisco Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair. It was, in fact, a lot of fun, and really quite strange on occasion. Not that I'm unfamiliar with the strange. I've been to gaming conventions and hacker conventions and sci-fi conventions and comics conventions and academic conferences. I've seen people in weird costumes, history professors doing "this little piggy" in latin with their infants, and impassioned, glorious rants on everything from civil rights to secure computing to what makes a good gaming experience. So from that point of view, the Anarchist Book Fair was very familiar, although all the details, issues, and glorious rants were new to me (in person anyway - I've read quite a bit of anarchist writings and written some myself in a way).

I was there promoting my own books, Geek Mafia, and the sequel, Geek Mafia: Mile Zero on behalf of myself and my wonderful new publisher, PM Press. New not only to me, but to everyone else as well, as they're only a few months old (although the people who make up PM have decades of publishing experience and contacts). I gave various version of my one-line sales pitch for Geek Mafia that I've said thousands of times before, although I tried a couple variations in an effort to appeal to this crowd's particular tastes. There wasn't a lot of other fiction at this predominantly serious-minded event, so I think my book there was both a little bit of fresh air and maybe a little confusing. People seemed a little unsure as to how fiction fit into the broader themes and politics of the event and movement, but once we explained out goal of coming at those same themes from another angle and persepctive, most people really liked the idea. In one of my talks this weeken I likened my books to a big helping of ice cream with some little vitamins of politics and inspiration slipped in there. Mostly they're about the fun and the exciting stories, but there's stuff in there to make you think too.

With that in mind, I thought I'd highlight a few other forms of radical fictional ice cream that I particularly admire and would encourage anyone to go out and read (right after they go out and read my stuff of course).

The Dispossesed by Ursula K LeGuin

This is, for me anyway, the perfect piece of anarchist sci-fi literature. Now, granted, there isn't a lot of competition in the field, but it's also just a great piece of fiction on any scale of measurement. It's the only piece of fiction I know of that really shows how a truly anarchist society might actually work, and it's by no means a utopian vision. But it's not necessarily unappealing either. What it is, is thought provoking which is all you can ask of a story really. It set my mind wandering to other possibilities and contemplating other modes of living and organizing society. I talked about it during my presentation at the book fair and I was really surprised how few of the people there had read it. Then again, as I said, they weren't a huge sci-fi crowd.

The Iron Council by Chine Mieville

I love me some China Mieville. He's one of the most imaginative, origial voisces in weird fiction writing these days, and his three greatest books, Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and The Iron Council are brilliant, dense, captivating pieces of fiction. They're all set in the same weird, dark pseudo-Victorian fantasy world, but each one stands entirely distinct from the others. There's magic, itrigue, strange science, big fights, and cool monsters of course, everything you want from a sci-fi or fantasy story. But there's also a lot of cool radical politics slipped in, especially in The Iron Council which features a workers revolt where the abused laborers literally take control of the means of prodution and then driving them away. Mieville himself is a movement activist and has a PhD in economics with a Marxist outlook. But don't let the politics throw you off - this a story first and foremost, and the radical ideology in there moves the story forward rather than weighing it down ad turing it into a lecture. Just the way it should be.

Against The Day by Thomas Pynchon

I have no idea what the politics of this book are. I'm listenind to the unabrdiged audiobook, which is 52 hours long and I'm only 4 hours in. But already it's much weirder and more wonderful than anything I expected, a delightful surprise that happens to combine many of my various obsessions/interests. Set in the later part of the 19th and early part of the 20th centuries, this sprawling American epic features anarchists, detectives, alcemists, photographers, dirigible flying crime pulp crime fighters, and even sentient ball lightning. I had no idea the book would contain such wild, pulpy aspects when I read the blurb. I was more intrigued to see how Pynchon would handle the turn of the century anarchist scene, which was orders of magnitude larger and more influential than it is today. But wow, there is so much more going on here. I'm not going to go so far as to recommend it yet since I'm only a fraction of the way into the story, but if anything I've mentioned so far catches your fancy, then by all means check this hefty tome out. And if you finish before I do, drop me a line and I'll post your review.