Book Review: Safety Through Solidarity

From Freedom News UK by Jay Arachnid

Poor timing or perfect timing? Re-centring American Jewish voices crying out against the weaponisation of Jewish trauma by extremist right-wing/quasi-fascist Israeli politicians while at the same time deflecting and minimising the homicidal oppression of Palestinians (and now Lebanese)? I ordered this book prior to the audacious October 7 Hamas attacks; the authors had to scramble to incorporate something about it in their introduction and toward the end of the text.

Margaret Killjoy

From Full Stop by Shane Burley

Speculative Fiction can be a place where we dream about what is possible, or even what we think is not. Because it is about future worlds or alternative trajectories, it opens up our imagination to a fundamental change in our society. For better or for worse, it is a temporal projection where we can take seriously (or precisely un-seriously) what giant social shifts can result in. This may be part of why we are living through a massive surge of radical Speculative/Science Fiction, which adds a revolutionary dimension to this world building. It alternates between two perspectives, the dystopian, where we see through the conclusions of the human self-destruction we are witnessing, or its alternative, the utopian. The utopian Speculative Fiction is the much harder of the two, willing to take risks by imagining something provocatively different, better, than what we have now.

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