rec: Margaret Killjoy Writes Queer Anarchist SF

[jesse_the_k]

Tor.com hosts the first chapters of two Killjoy novellas I really enjoyed:

• The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion
• The Barrow Will Send What It May

Both feature trans anarchist Danielle Cain solving crime in a near-now infused with death, hope, and magic. A stone SF fan, I generally find magic too twee. Killjoy addresses the tricky power dynamics magic engenders in a satisfying fashion. magpiekilljoy has mined the years spent living in her van to make a silvery, diesel-coated landscape, realistically evoking the rootlessness and solidarity needed to survive as our world falls apart.

• Everything that Isn’t Winter by Margaret Killjoy is a short story at Tor.com. She addresses solidarity, competence, violence, anxiety and tea. Do the skills that enable us to survive post-apocalypse render us unloveable?

The band played war songs on guitars and fiddles and drums. The handsome men of the choir sang the songs I’d fought to, songs I relish. Songs that transport us from the world of the living to that liminal place of both battle and sex, where we make and take life. My bare feet were in earth, the mountain wind in my hair. My boyfriend’s dance partner wandered to the edge of the crowd, and I went to stand beside her.

Much more reading, and music, and crafts on her site:
BirdsBeforeTheStorm.net

As always, Bertolt Brecht’s poem "To Prosperity" comes to mind:

[… snip …]
For we went, changing our country more often than our shoes.
In the class war, despairing
When there was only injustice and no resistance.

For we knew only too well:
Even the hatred of squalor
Makes the brow grow stern.
Even anger against injustice
Makes the voice grow harsh. Alas, we
Who wished to lay the foundations of kindness
Could not ourselves be kind.
[… snip …]

Comments

[brainwane]

I love Killjoy's work! Here are some thoughts I wrote about themes in her work a few years ago!

Excellent insights

[jesse_the_k]

it brings the fantastic lens to "The Tyranny of Structurelessness". What does it feel like and what happens, within each of us and among us, when our inability to persuade others to take urgent collective action collides with the heartfelt desire to avoid dominating others?

Ahhhh! That's why it felt so meaningful.

free ebook, June 7th last day

[runpunkrun]

The full text of The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion is part of Tor.com's free ebook bundle for June. If you live in the US or Canada, you can sign up to their newsletter (which I enjoy receiving!) and get the bundle in DRM-free epub or mobi before 11:59 PM ET, June 7th, 2019.

Re: free ebook, June 7th last day

[jesse_the_k]

Timely info (even tho this thanks is overdue)

[vass]

I read The Lamb Will Slaughter The Lion last month! It was really good and I definitely want to read the sequel.

I liked how grounded in reality it was. Idealistic and optimistic without rose-coloured glasses.

[jesse_the_k]

I think I liked the sequel even better, because it's even more grounded.

[luzula]

Thanks for the link to the Brecht poem!

[jesse_the_k]

You're most welcome.

Probably the best remnant of my teenage year spent in a Maoist communist cell was learning that poem.