reviews

Red In Pen & Claw: The Meanest Reviews of Green Anarchy

Red In Pen & Claw
The Meanest Reviews of Green Anarchy
Now Available!

“They’ve come down from those Kalikak hills, those hills with eyes, to bring forth critiques of anarchist orthodoxy. They bring forth anarch heterodoxy, spitting primal rage. These are the meanest reviews from Green Anarchy, from 2002 through 2008. They were calling you out on your bullshit twenty years before you adopted your AI designed NPC ideology. So travel back in time, to first blood lust against bad actors.” - Red In Pen & Claw

Science Fiction as Protest Art (Part II): Dystopias of Domination

from the commoner by Javier Sethness.

This is the second entry in a three-part response to Thomas Wilson Jardine's December 2020 essay, ‘Cyberpunk: An Empty Rebellion?’ In this section, we will briefly examine around twenty instances of dystopian “capitalist hells” in speculative fiction, whether literature or films. See our final installment for an analysis of alternative and anti-modern utopias, together with the dialectic between dystopia and metaphorical heavens in Ursula K. Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson's novels and the Deus Ex game universe.

The protest art made by Soviet utopian sci-fi writers last century, and many of the producers of speculative and visionary fiction who have followed them since, share a common concern with the infernal nature of capitalism, whether openly or by implication. In this sense, Thomas Wilson Jardine is surely right to warn that media corporations cynically exploit these ‘rebellious’ themes for profit and self-aggrandisement. At the same time, the unfortunate existence of this dynamic in no way delegitimises the righteous concerns raised by speculative artists throughout history to the present.

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