Mythmakers and Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers on Fiction
Just in case you haven’t heard, AK’s brand-new collection of interviews with anarchist fiction authors is out! Mythmakers & Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers on Fiction is a collection of fourteen original interviews conducted by SteamPunk Magazine‘s Margaret Killjoy that probe the depths of the intersections of anarchist politics and the world of fiction. The authors included here are amazing:
- Ursula K. Le Guin (the author of the beloved The Dispossessed, among other things)!
- Alan Moore (yeah, THAT Alan Moore, the one who wrote Watchmen and V for Vendetta, and hated the film versions of both)!
- Cristy C. Road (of the absolutely iconic illustrations you see on books, magazines, zines, and websites far and wide)!
- Michael Moorcock (who, whether he meant to or not, essentially invented the genre of cyberpunk)!
Okay, I won’t do that for all of the authors in the book, but they’re all fascinating folks, and every interview included is worth a read. You’ll learn a lot and enjoy yourself in the process. Plus, the book includes three appendices covering a wide variety of living and deceased anarchists (and fellow travelers) who wrote fiction, and include lists novels, novellas, and short stories that have anarchist protagonists or explore anarchist societies. The lists aren’t exhaustive, by any means, but they’re a good start, and the book’s editor has also started a website where YOU can expand, and discuss the lists and biographies (www.anarchistfiction.net). And, don’t forget about the introduction by sci-fi powerhouse Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Mars trilogy, and one of Time Magazine‘s “Heroes of the Environment.”
On a more personal note, I have to tell you how proud I am of this book. This was the first project I “acquired” for AK after I became a member of the collective, and it’s the first project I coordinated for AK from start to finish, and I really couldn’t be happier with the way it turned out. If you haven’t seen a physical copy of the book yet, you really should, it’s such a beautiful little book! Mythmakers also represented chance to work on a larger project with Margaret Killjoy, who I first began collaborating with as a contributing editor to SteamPunk Magazine, and whose literary, aesthetic, and activist work I deeply respect and am continually inspired by.
It also seems to me, personally, that the release of this book really marks a turning point in the way that we need to think about politics and propaganda in the world of anarchist publishing. Maybe this won’t surprise you, but I’ve never been an avid reader of fiction, actually. Don’t have anything against it, just not my favorite thing to read (though I have read a lot of fiction and literature over the years, don’t get me wrong). For me, though, it was really through the editorial work I did on SteamPunk (and it wasn’t a lot, mind you! many folks did far, far more than I did), and the associated conversations with Margaret that I really started to reconsider fiction’s role in shaping the way we think about politics, about our current context, and about what a better world might actually look like.
Turns out that these sorts of things are precisely what the authors included in this collection are thinking about, and that makes Mythmakers & Lawbreakers not just an entertaining afternoon of reading, but an important—and unexpected—tool for organizing as well. Someday I’ll manage to sit Margaret down for an interview about the book, and about fiction as a political tool, and I’ll post that here. But in the meantime, I’m pleased to be able to post Margaret’s introduction and conclusion to the book, and a very brief excerpt from the interview with the incomparable Ursula K. Le Guin!
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Mythmakers & Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers on Fiction (AK Press, 2009)
Editor’s Note, by Margaret Killjoy
As Derrick Jensen said to me, “Any book that doesn’t start from the fact that this culture is killing the planet and work to resolve it is unforgiveable.” So why was I writing fiction?
I started this project that you hold in your hands in the spring of 2007. I had been writing a lot of short stories and had just published my first widely-read piece, “Yena of Angeline and the Tale of the Terrible Townies.” I started wondering who else was doing what I was doing, which other anarchists were writing fiction. Moreover, I started wondering why. What could we hope to accomplish through storytelling? So I went on down to the San Francisco Anarchist Bookfair, which is the largest anarchist bookfair in the US, to scour up some fiction. I didn’t find much; in fact, I only came back with two thin novels. I decided the whole thing needed a bit more active research. And like any good zinemaker, I decided I would collect everything I figured out into a zine of some sort.
The first thing I did was write Ursula K. Le Guin a letter, and it was the best possible first step. Her interest in the project spurred me forward, and it didn’t hurt that so many of the other authors I interviewed are fans of her work. I spent two years tracking down anarchist authors from as wide of a spectrum as possible. Somewhere along the way it became book length, and AK Press agreed to publish it.
I don’t think it’s any stretch of the imagination to say that not all of the authors I talked to would agree with each other about much more than the desire for an anarchist society, if that. I’ve spoken with pacifists and insurrectionary anarchists, with anti-civilization authors and pro-technology ones. But they’ve all got a lot to say about storytelling, a lot to say about society. I’m glad to get them under one cover.
From the interview with Ursula K. Le Guin
Margaret: Have you encountered any problems, publishing in the mainstream fiction world, on account of your political nature?
Ursula: Not that I know of. It is possible that Charles Scribner, who had published my previous book and had an option on The Dispossessed, didn’t like it because he didn’t like the anarchist theme; but I think he really just thought it was a huge, boring, meaningless clunker and didn’t understand it at all. He asked me to cut it by half. I said no thanks, and we broke contract amicably, and Harper & Row snapped it up—a better publisher for me then anyhow. So I can’t say I have suffered for my politics.
SF and fantasy slip under the wire a lot, you know? People just aren’t looking for radical thought in a field the respectable critics define as escapist drivel.
Some of it is escapist all right, but what it’s escaping is the drivel of popular fiction and most TV and movies.
Margaret: I feel like you do an excellent job of presenting quite radical concepts in stories that don’t feel like propaganda. For example, in the story “Ile Forest” in Orsinian Tales, I believe you undermine the reader’s faith in such ideas as codified law.
Ursula: Hah! That pleases me! It is such a romantic story, I never thought of it as having a subversive sense, but of course you’re quite right, it does.
Margaret: I might be mistaken, but I’m under the impression that the modern fantasy/sci-fi culture intentionally shies away from politics more than it used to. A lot of magazines, for example, specifically list that they are not interested in works that deal with political issues.
Ursula: They do? Wow. That is depressing beyond words. They’re setting up their own wire.
Margaret: Have you seen a change in this direction?
Ursula: I am just not looking at the market any more. I haven’t written short stories now for quite a while, and if I did, it would be my agent who figured where best to send them.
But maybe this is one of the reasons why I’m not reading much SF any more. I pick it up, then I put it down. Maybe I just o.d.’d on it. But it seems sort of academic, almost, lately. Doing the same stuff over fancier, more hardware, more noir. I may be totally wrong about this.
Margaret: You’ve coined perhaps my favorite one-line descriptions of what an anarchist is: “One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.” Would you describe yourself as an anarchist?
Ursula: I don’t, because I entirely lack the activist element, and so it seems phony or too easy. Like white people who say they are “part Cherokee.”
Margaret: I hope you don’t mind that a lot of us claim you, in approximately the same way that we claim Tolstoy. (Who I believe can be quoted as saying “The anarchists are right … in everything except their belief that anarchism can be reached through revolution,” although I’ve only read this quote, and not his original essay.)
Ursula: Of course I don’t mind! I am touched and feel unworthy.
Margaret: What were your first interactions with anarchism?
Ursula: When I got the idea for The Dispossessed, the story I sketched out was all wrong, and I had to figure out what it really was about and what it needed. What it needed was first about a year of reading all the Utopias, and then another year or two of reading all the anarchist writers. That was my main interaction with anarchism. I was lucky: that stuff was hard to come by in the seventies—shadows of Sacco and Vanzetti!—but there was a very-far-left bookseller here in Portland, and if you got to know him he let you see his fine collection of all the old Anarchist writings, and some of the newer people like Bookchin too. So I got a good education.
I felt totally at home with (pacifist, not violent) anarchism, just as I always had with Taoism (they are related, at least by affinity). It is the only mode of political thinking that I do feel at home with. It also links up more and more interestingly, these days, with behavioral biology and animal psychology (as Kropotkin knew it would).
Conclusions, by Margaret Killjoy
So what the hell are we going to accomplish by writing fiction? As it turns out, plenty of things. I think that perhaps we anarchists, in our desire for direct action, overlook the beauty and subtlety of the symbolic.
I’m not going to argue that all we need to do is write books or tell stories around the hearth. Of course not.
The other night, I asked my friend—a committed activist—what she thought could be done to stop mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia. “You know what I’m going to say,” she said. “We need to completely dismantle the capitalist system.” And she was right: even if we enacted laws to protect the mountains, money would find its way around. Even if we blocked every road with our bodies, the state would remove us. Those mountains aren’t going to be safe until the entire system is uprooted, and those roots run deep.
But fiction is a part of that uprooting. We need to be inspired and we need to inspire. And fiction offers the chance to explore things deeply in ways that other mediums can’t.
What’s more, some of us learn more from fiction than theory. This was something I was vaguely ashamed of for a long time, something I kept to myself: I don’t much like reading theory. Even stripped of its academic language, it rarely holds my attention. I used to think that made me a worse anarchist or something, but it turns out that I’m not alone.
Fiction is even more important for the young, because we model our ideal selves on role models. We need heroes to learn from, and we need anti-heroes to remember that none of us are, or will ever be, perfect.
And we need to tell stories about ourselves, because others are talking too. Every book and movie out there with a cop as a hero, saving the world from terrorists and thugs hellbent on chaos? We need to counter that. We need books about the oppressed, about the beauty of resistance.
And honestly, we just need stories with some damn teeth. It’s hip these days to be apolitical, detached. There are books coming out that aren’t afraid of a little meaning, but by and large we’re in a sea of cultural vapidity.
Not that we need to see the world one-dimensionally. There’s more to life than politics, and not all anarchists are wonderful and not all statists are assholes. But this is one way in which fiction really shines: if you did write a dry utopia, devoid of conflict, it wouldn’t make a very good story. Fiction
is uniquely suited to propose ideas and then say, “Not that this would be perfect, mind you.” While so much of our other work—theory and direct action protest alike—presents answers to the world, fiction presents questions. And our job isn’t to convert people to anarchism, it’s to get them to ask their own questions, reach their own answers.
Learning how to tell stories is a good way to spend your time. It’s something that anyone can practice, that anyone can enjoy. But it’s also something that some of us are going to specialize in. And we anarchists and DIY enthusiasts have a lot of advantages in trying our hand as fiction writers. For one thing, printing and distribution are in our control: we’ve got infoshops and online distribution, shows and events to table at. For another, we’ve got a wonderful critique of failure: if you don’t fail from time to time, you’re not setting your goals high enough.
By and large, we reject intellectual property. We know that all of our stories are influenced by our experiences, that ideas don’t just come out from nowhere. So we’ve less fear of success, less fear of useless, heady, and alienating fame. It’s certainly better to be respected as a peer than revered as an icon.
And unlike so many cultures in late capitalism, we’re not afraid to be earnest. We’re not “too cool” to be unapologetically happy that our friends are doing what they honestly want to do, writing what they truly feel moved to write.
So there’s no reason to be afraid to start writing, to start storytelling. Be proud as an anarchist mythmaker. You’re in good company and up to good work. The world needs new stories, better stories. Remember though, the world needs more new gardens and less new stripmalls too, so maybe it’s best not to get too specialized.
Order a copy of Mythmakers & Lawbreakers today!