Before I get into the latest reading and viewing roundup, I want to say something directly to my fellow creators.
One of the most difficult parts of living in a polycrisis is that we’re still expected to maintain personal goals and ambitions, hopes and dreams, even when everything around us is calling for a major re-think. We have volunteer commitments to related professional organizations, elaborate publication plans, and cute stories we’ve been dreaming up that we’d love to finally jot down.
And we’re supposed to keep acting like any of this matters.
Like it’s the most “radical” work we could be doing right now.
There’s an overused wartime phrase, “Keep Calm and Carry On”, that was meant to help citizens go about their lives even when rationing and air raid sirens were quickly becoming standard parts of British life. After being re-popularized in 2000, the expression has become so kitschy as to serve almost as self-parody, showing up on T-shirts, mugs, and posters in all sorts of absurd and even contradictory formations.
But even in its original formation, what the phrase didn’t include and doesn’t prepare us for is… existential. Deeply, painfully existential.
What happens when the things that once mattered to us have even less of a chance of mattering to anyone else? What happens if you keep calm and keep writing SFF stories, for instance, only to see more and more publications shuttering because the tech bubble, the financial bubble, and the Amazon monopoly have brought us to a terrible breaking point, diminishing the viability of traditional industry outlets? And what if fewer people show up for creative fundraisers, because they’re busy donating to crisis causes: migration, food aid, climate change recovery, rent for those on the verge of eviction? What if fewer people are reading, or getting hyped about awards, because we’re all busy doom-scrolling active disaster zones?
This isn’t a hypothetical.
It’s also, for me, deeply personal.
At the close of 2022, I had made a plan to self-publish a major work every two months this year—all the work that hadn’t made it with traditional publishers, and a little more besides. But a lot went wrong. I lost an income stream after Christmas, then a local family in medical crisis fell my way in January and February. I fell behind on my work from the stress of it all—trying to help a little boy survive double-lung pneumonia, and get his deeply panicked, bureaucracy-illiterate family back on track, so they wouldn’t be living on the streets again.
In the short term, this worked. In the mid-term, both the little one and his brother died. A terrible year for the father, obviously. A heartbreaking reminder, for me, of what I warned readers here about at the outset: that there aren’t always happy endings when we try to help others—but that this doesn’t mean we don’t still try.
On a personal, far less life-or-death level, that other family’s crisis threw me off my plan completely. My podcast episodes in January and February weren’t what I wanted them to be, and it took many months to finish them at all. I tried to promote my books, but the material cost of self-publishing was too steep, even at my modest budget, especially after a few months of lost income. I found myself back in a debt I’d tried hard to climb out of, in my first years in Colombia. My fridge has been off since May to cut costs (no big loss, actually). I water fasted for three weeks in June.
And yet… when I say that I’ve had a tough year, it’s not really because of any of the above. I don’t need much to live, and I don’t regret trying to help children in crisis in my community. Also, if I’m disappointed in myself for not producing better quality work in the middle of the fray… well, what’s new there, for me? I’ve always been extra-demanding about my work.
No, my “tough year” came from everything that was happening around my little problems. It came from the cognitive dissonance one must sustain, to pursue one’s goals in publishing while there’s a war on (Russia in Ukraine) that’s exacerbated immigrant trauma at borders in the US and Europe, and while disinformation campaigns continue to prop up white nationalists in Western politics, to the extreme detriment of marginalized communities, and while record-breaking climate change events are accompanied by even worse forecasts for coming environmental health. While my industry—my supposedly “forward-looking” SFF industry!—panics in the most self-serving way over so-called AI, instead of at the corporate players leveraging this new gimmicky tech the way they leverage everything else.
Something really broke in me this year.
And that was before the latest round of madness: not in Israel and Palestine, exactly, but in online discourse around it. In this past month, we’ve been hit by the cruelty and the gamification of so much global response: Indifference to disinformation if it supports “my” side. Anger, when asked to care what happens to civilians on the “other” side. A denial that there even are civilians in the first place, and a rush to argue that whole demographics are culpable and deserve to die. The sheer delight, for some, of imagining further war, further violence, further mayhem in the region.
I live in a country that has three active civil conflicts—with ELN, dissident FARC, and Clan del Golfo. When people in my neighbourhood talk about what’s happening in Israel and Gaza and the West Bank, they grieve. That’s it. They grieve the fear people are living with. They grieve the civilians who are dying and displaced. They—being religious, mostly—pray for civilians to be safe again soon.
Colombians are well aware of wartime atrocities.
They understand what it’s like to live in a conflict where no one abides by international law, or Geneva Conventions—and yet, ceasefires are never out of the question. Because it’s complicated. Because there’s always a weird blend of civilian and soldier in armed conflict.
Some here still support a former president who fought FARC by sanctioning military actions that amounted to civilian slaughter. Why? Because his actions made them feel safer. Meanwhile, others loathe him for one and the same. To them, he delayed peace by years with his strongman tactics.
And the situation was reversed for the next president, the one who created the 2016 peace treaty: some will never forgive him for allowing guerrillas who kidnapped, tortured, raped, and murdered to be reintegrated into civil society. Others are thankful for one and the same—because the peace treaty at least created an opportunity for the country to stabilize again.
To be clear: Colombians are not a hivemind, any more than Israel is, or the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The current left-wing president has been very firm in his criticism of Netanyahu’s actions in Gaza—but to no one’s surprise, considering his own background as a guerrilla fighter in his youth. Colombians have been divided in whether they support Petro’s language and stance (i.e., some support his defence of Gazan civilians, but not his language), and many marched in Bogotá to declare that he doesn’t speak for them at all—just as many have marched in the US, to say that Biden doesn’t speak for them: democracy, baby!
But there is also much more understanding that war is not a game. People here openly grieve everyone caught in the middle—because they were caught in the middle. Or their families were, in harder days. There’s no denial of the atrocity of October 7, and how it’s spread fear throughout Jewish people around the world. There’s also no denying the horrors inflicted on civilians in Gaza ever since.
And all of that—again, for me—just deepens my sense of futility, when I look at what we’ve wrought in Western discourse: a vastly gamified space where many now act as if one can only ever empathize with civilians on one “side”; that to do otherwise is to give comfort to either terrorists or fanatic settlers.
What has it all been for, I wonder: all our grand appeals to higher learning, the humanizing power of art, and the imaginative potential of fiction to craft a sense of better worlds than the one in which we live? How has all that writing and thinking and discussing served us, in the end, if when it comes to this massive onslaught of very real disasters, we still find ourselves so ill-prepared to face them well?
We are not responding maturely to any of the issues before us.
It is a game to many of us.
And in that game, if you have any heart whatsoever, you’re supposed to—what? Content yourself with the old way of being players all that same? In my creative fields, for instance, we’re supposed to accept how little literature, journalism, and education has actually empowered and enlightened us as a species—and… keep going?
Keep Calm and Carry On?
Now, I might be an extreme case.
I am, after all, moving through a place of disgust right now, for thinking that anything I strove for ever mattered—and that’s a sign of a pretty deep depression!
But perhaps some of my fellow creators have felt a flicker of similar.
Perhaps you’re hurt that sales are down, or that no one’s talking about your work, or that the whole industry seems more muted all around.
And if that describes you? I just want you to know three things:
You’re not alone with thoughts of disappointment, futility, and estrangement from every goal you once considered of the most pressing importance in your life.
It’s not your fault that you feel this way, either. This is a world-grief, and a world-shift, in which a way of being is falling so hard and so fast out from under you. It’s not a sign of your lack of worth as a person that you might not “succeed” at many of the things you once so dearly valued in your life. It just is. And lastly…
Yes. Keep Calm. That part is useful. The rest of the phrase might not come together for a while, but hold on until it does. Just—Keep Calm. Keep Calm. Keep Calm. The world is awful right now, but nothing lasts forever. When it comes to our current crises, eventually something will have to give.
And now, for this month’s reading and viewing recs:
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