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Whether Change: The Revolution Will Be Weird
I AM THE REVOLUTION. REPEAT!
Revolutionary tales of resilience and growth, defiance and upheaval from
WC Dunlap • Rachel Pollack • Nick Mamatas • Evan J. Peterson • Rena Mason • S.B. Divya • Gerald L. Coleman • Mary Anne Mohanraj • Craig Laurance Gidney • Nadia Bulkin • Bogi Takács • Margaret Killjoy
Tomorrow is here! Superpowered nationalists, CRISPR babies, alien communists, bloodsucking buildings, holy street justice, otherworldly anarchists, resurrection in the post-apocalypse, and more. There will be no going back.
Revolutionary tales of resilience and growth, defiance and upheaval from
WC Dunlap • Rachel Pollack • Nick Mamatas • Evan J. Peterson • Rena Mason • S.B. Divya • Gerald L. Coleman • Mary Anne Mohanraj • Craig Laurance Gidney • Nadia Bulkin • Bogi Takács • Margaret Killjoy
Tomorrow is here! Superpowered nationalists, CRISPR babies, alien communists, bloodsucking buildings, holy street justice, otherworldly anarchists, resurrection in the post-apocalypse, and more. There will be no going back.
180 pages, Hardcover
Published August 3, 2021
2 people are currently reading
47 people want to read
About the author
Scott Gable
33 books35 followersEditing and publishing speculative fiction gives me all the fuel I need. Keep an eye out for new and weird releases from Broken Eye Books!
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 5, 2021
Revolution means many things in literature as it does in the world. Fighting for change in the world more often than not means envisioning the world we want to see. In most cases of both mainstream and radical speculative fiction, it means shining a light on a world we hope never to ever see. Broken Eye Books have released steampunk ghost and Lovecraftian anthologies including two volumes of books about campus life at Howie’s made-up university. All fun and exciting stuff but this book which has an activist feel is the most exciting to me.
It features several authors I was aware of and interested in such as Nick Mamatas and Nadia Bulkin and new discoveries like Bogi Takacs. That is what the best anthologies do, give you a few authors you know and respect while opening your eyes to new talent.
From the back cover:
“Tomorrow is here! Superpowered nationalists, CRISPR babies, alien communists, bloodsucking buildings, holy street justice, otherworldly anarchists, resurrection in the post-apocalypse, and more. There will be no going back.”
My favorite stories in the collection were the stories by Bogi Takacs, Nick Mamatas, and S.B. Divya. Let’s start with my favorite the Takacs tale “A Technical Term, Like Privilege.” This delightfully strange story could be called Bizarro, Surrealist, or Absurdist. I am not such any of those are exactly right but the story is a very unique piece with biological homes, body horror class warfare, and probably more I could identify with a closer look. In this story, the main character lives in a housebeast.
What do I mean by class warfare body horror…
“I glare at the dark purple walls, the rugged, ribbed interior of the housebeast. Why does it need me? I can’t even hate it. I feel bad for it. It’s trapped same as I am. It needs my cheap blood filled with magic and whatever power comes out of a hot dog after it’s digested. I’m surprised my terrible diet hasn’t poisoned it already.
Well, that would certainly be a way to take Revenge on the rental office.”
Yes, this story is the reason I have the Dead Kennedys song “Let’s Lynch the Landlord” stuck in my head. This story is a wonderful metaphor for me to read when the eviction ban was being over turned and debated nationally.
Nick Mamatas story The Nth International is a comical piece that savagely mocks the billionaire space race and features a communist Alexa AI assistant. It would be easy to laugh off this story as a goofy satire but it is no less radical than anything else in the collection. S.B. Divya writes the most emotionally rich story in the collection, it is subtle but a poetic story that really worked for me.
I loved almost all the stories in one way or another.WC Dunlap’s opener Salt Water to Wine played with mythology in a cool way and Nadia Bulkin’s story Purity was short but more evocative than some novels.
The exception of Rachel Pollock’s Sarah Memory and Evan J. Peterson’s #wondercabinet. They were both fine stories that I didn’t connect with. Peterson’s story that takes place all in tweets is an interesting experiment just me personally turned me off. I get what he was doing and saw that he executed it fine, there is plenty of excellent commentaries. That said for this structure geek I had a hard time following it.
Whether Change is a great collection. The revolutionary spirit is something that science fiction more often than not happens upon by accident. This is not an earth-shaking genre-redefining collection like Dangerous Visions in the 60s but it doesn’t need to be that. Whether Change is a home for overlooked voices in mainstream publishing, that is as just as important tossing over the table and redefining a genre. So thank Broken Eye Books by checking out this bold anthology.
If enough of you do, maybe you all can prove me wrong and change everything. I would welcome a future not like these stories but one where these types of voices are mainstream.
It features several authors I was aware of and interested in such as Nick Mamatas and Nadia Bulkin and new discoveries like Bogi Takacs. That is what the best anthologies do, give you a few authors you know and respect while opening your eyes to new talent.
From the back cover:
“Tomorrow is here! Superpowered nationalists, CRISPR babies, alien communists, bloodsucking buildings, holy street justice, otherworldly anarchists, resurrection in the post-apocalypse, and more. There will be no going back.”
My favorite stories in the collection were the stories by Bogi Takacs, Nick Mamatas, and S.B. Divya. Let’s start with my favorite the Takacs tale “A Technical Term, Like Privilege.” This delightfully strange story could be called Bizarro, Surrealist, or Absurdist. I am not such any of those are exactly right but the story is a very unique piece with biological homes, body horror class warfare, and probably more I could identify with a closer look. In this story, the main character lives in a housebeast.
What do I mean by class warfare body horror…
“I glare at the dark purple walls, the rugged, ribbed interior of the housebeast. Why does it need me? I can’t even hate it. I feel bad for it. It’s trapped same as I am. It needs my cheap blood filled with magic and whatever power comes out of a hot dog after it’s digested. I’m surprised my terrible diet hasn’t poisoned it already.
Well, that would certainly be a way to take Revenge on the rental office.”
Yes, this story is the reason I have the Dead Kennedys song “Let’s Lynch the Landlord” stuck in my head. This story is a wonderful metaphor for me to read when the eviction ban was being over turned and debated nationally.
Nick Mamatas story The Nth International is a comical piece that savagely mocks the billionaire space race and features a communist Alexa AI assistant. It would be easy to laugh off this story as a goofy satire but it is no less radical than anything else in the collection. S.B. Divya writes the most emotionally rich story in the collection, it is subtle but a poetic story that really worked for me.
I loved almost all the stories in one way or another.WC Dunlap’s opener Salt Water to Wine played with mythology in a cool way and Nadia Bulkin’s story Purity was short but more evocative than some novels.
The exception of Rachel Pollock’s Sarah Memory and Evan J. Peterson’s #wondercabinet. They were both fine stories that I didn’t connect with. Peterson’s story that takes place all in tweets is an interesting experiment just me personally turned me off. I get what he was doing and saw that he executed it fine, there is plenty of excellent commentaries. That said for this structure geek I had a hard time following it.
Whether Change is a great collection. The revolutionary spirit is something that science fiction more often than not happens upon by accident. This is not an earth-shaking genre-redefining collection like Dangerous Visions in the 60s but it doesn’t need to be that. Whether Change is a home for overlooked voices in mainstream publishing, that is as just as important tossing over the table and redefining a genre. So thank Broken Eye Books by checking out this bold anthology.
If enough of you do, maybe you all can prove me wrong and change everything. I would welcome a future not like these stories but one where these types of voices are mainstream.
Read
July 18, 2022Catching up on reading my contributor copies. As usual, no review, but I do list my favorites of the volume for later reference.
"Salt Water to Wine" by WC Dunlap
"Sarah Memory: A Fragment of the Revolution" by Rachel Pollack (an Unquenchable Fire story!)
"This Mother's Milk" by Rena Mason
"Float Day" by S.B. Divya
"A Field, a Shadow, Indeed a Shadow" by Margaret Killjoy
+ the introduction by Scott Gable was really unexpected!
Also, I read a small excerpt from my story here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...
_________
Source of the book: Print contributor copy from the publisher
"Salt Water to Wine" by WC Dunlap
"Sarah Memory: A Fragment of the Revolution" by Rachel Pollack (an Unquenchable Fire story!)
"This Mother's Milk" by Rena Mason
"Float Day" by S.B. Divya
"A Field, a Shadow, Indeed a Shadow" by Margaret Killjoy
+ the introduction by Scott Gable was really unexpected!
Also, I read a small excerpt from my story here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...
_________
Source of the book: Print contributor copy from the publisher
April 25, 2022
9-'The revolution will be weird' is the subtitle for this anthology, and it's a fitting subtitle as these stories are all dealing with revolution. Minorities fighting for recognistion, queer people carving out a space to be themselves, the poor overthrowing economic systems keeping them down and 'the world turned upside down'. As revolutions themselves are processes transcending individual action and responsibility, gathering in themselves the anger of the downtrodden and the fear of the powerfull and by unpredictable processes transforming those in both positive outcomes (change, justice, freedom) and negative ones (death, pain and destruction) it is a powerful substrate for the weird, the horrific and the wonderfull - in fiction it seems that the speculative genre of the weird is the best tool to capture the reality warping nature of revolution, the sense that all is coming undone and both society and individuals can find themselves in previously unimagined realities. So creating an anthology of weird fiction concering revolution is in hindsight quite obvious. And it works very well. Hardly any disappointments in here, even though I didn't totally get the conclusion of '#wondercabinet' by Evan J. Peterson, and I thought the ending of 'Purity' by Nadia Bulkin a bit too ambivalent, being partial to stories with a clear sense of resolution myself. Even those stories had a lot I enjoyed and the rest was very good. Mind you, as a leftist myself and someone angry about climate change, inequality and the effects of neoliberal politics and kapitalist economics, I was partial to the political bend of these stories. Most stories are written by people from disadvantaged backgrounds, women, people of color and LBTQIA+-authors. Several stories were written by trans people or agender people, or featured trans people or agender people. I liked reading these perspectives and empathizing with their struggles, and I would hope more of their voices would be heard even in more mainstream SF-publications.
'Salt water to wine' by WC Dunlap was a powerful opening to the antology, featuring a post apocalyptic future where faith is outlawed and children are taken from the streets by a corporation. Interesting dichotomies, but the end was maybe a bit too on the nose. Although it fit with the first story of the collection setting the tone for the rest.
'Sarah Memory: A Fragment of the Revolution' by Rachel Pollack fit thematically to that last story, by using religious iconography.
'The Nth International' by Nick Mamatas added a lot of humor to the scenario of communist intruders tying up a biljonaire to gain use of one of his space ships for their own purposes. I had to laugh about some twists and turns in this one.
'This Mother's Milk' by Rena Mason veered more into horror territory, with scientists experimenting on baby's and the results of that. Some gruesome imagery here, a lot of body horror, and a powerful conclusion.
'Float Day' by S.B. Divya makes economic disparity, the difference between the haves and the have nots, becoming outwardly visible, and the consequences of that between three friends. The mataphor was a little too obvious maybe, so it became a bit preachy, but it worked none the less.
The same is true for 'The Mystery Watch' by Gerald L. Coleman that had a powerful idea that could have done with more narrative exploration. In this form it seemed like a parable, not like a story.
'Wake' by MaryAnne Mohanraj is very much of this time, taking place during the COVID pandemic and thus apt to age quickly. A story about a woman torn between keeping herself and her family safe and protesting in the Black Lives Matter-protests is beautifully told, but the genre elements take a back seat and could easily have been removed. So in that aspect not the best story of this collection.
'Sacred She-Devil' by Craig Laurance Gidney was a story within a story about abuse and revenge, beautifully written but without a lot of meat on its bones.
The best stories were the final two. 'A Technical Term, Like Privilege' by Bogi Takacs is a great example of weird fiction, with a magic user renting a room in a house beast by letting it suck blood to gain magic. Great idea's, good characterisation and the right amount of resolution.
'A Field, a Shadow, Indeed a Shadow' by Margaret Killjoy is also great weird fiction. Two queer friends find the forst where they had built a fort torn down and want to take revenge. Going out at night to sabotage the bulldozers they hear a voice from the petrol tanks ... A great story, with fun characters that were engaging to read about and a harrowing choice at the end. A great end to this collection.
'Salt water to wine' by WC Dunlap was a powerful opening to the antology, featuring a post apocalyptic future where faith is outlawed and children are taken from the streets by a corporation. Interesting dichotomies, but the end was maybe a bit too on the nose. Although it fit with the first story of the collection setting the tone for the rest.
'Sarah Memory: A Fragment of the Revolution' by Rachel Pollack fit thematically to that last story, by using religious iconography.
'The Nth International' by Nick Mamatas added a lot of humor to the scenario of communist intruders tying up a biljonaire to gain use of one of his space ships for their own purposes. I had to laugh about some twists and turns in this one.
'This Mother's Milk' by Rena Mason veered more into horror territory, with scientists experimenting on baby's and the results of that. Some gruesome imagery here, a lot of body horror, and a powerful conclusion.
'Float Day' by S.B. Divya makes economic disparity, the difference between the haves and the have nots, becoming outwardly visible, and the consequences of that between three friends. The mataphor was a little too obvious maybe, so it became a bit preachy, but it worked none the less.
The same is true for 'The Mystery Watch' by Gerald L. Coleman that had a powerful idea that could have done with more narrative exploration. In this form it seemed like a parable, not like a story.
'Wake' by MaryAnne Mohanraj is very much of this time, taking place during the COVID pandemic and thus apt to age quickly. A story about a woman torn between keeping herself and her family safe and protesting in the Black Lives Matter-protests is beautifully told, but the genre elements take a back seat and could easily have been removed. So in that aspect not the best story of this collection.
'Sacred She-Devil' by Craig Laurance Gidney was a story within a story about abuse and revenge, beautifully written but without a lot of meat on its bones.
The best stories were the final two. 'A Technical Term, Like Privilege' by Bogi Takacs is a great example of weird fiction, with a magic user renting a room in a house beast by letting it suck blood to gain magic. Great idea's, good characterisation and the right amount of resolution.
'A Field, a Shadow, Indeed a Shadow' by Margaret Killjoy is also great weird fiction. Two queer friends find the forst where they had built a fort torn down and want to take revenge. Going out at night to sabotage the bulldozers they hear a voice from the petrol tanks ... A great story, with fun characters that were engaging to read about and a harrowing choice at the end. A great end to this collection.
August 26, 2025
Weird Revolutionary tales, often SF, Fantasy, or Horror. The best three are:
“#wondercabinet” by Even J. Peterson. The story is told in Twitter snippets. Think tRump + The Boys, with a vengeful posthuman, secretly allied with post-human supremacists winning the Presidency to make the USA superpowered again. He swears to imprison or kill his opponents and pardon super-villains in the Barge to join the Guardian superpolice. Pretty topical.
“Float Day” by S. B. Divya. On Float Day, everyone in the world floats based on their ownership of stuff relative to their surrounding community. Those with the least stuff float the most. Nice parable about capitalism and income inequity. Would make an excellent Twilight Zone episode.
“Wake” by Mary Anne Mohanraj. Wonderful story about a middle-aged liberal fighting to maintain all her connections during the pandemic shutdown and BLM protests. Quiet, magical, and poignant.
There are some other fine stories and a few very experimental ones that have more ambition than execution.
“#wondercabinet” by Even J. Peterson. The story is told in Twitter snippets. Think tRump + The Boys, with a vengeful posthuman, secretly allied with post-human supremacists winning the Presidency to make the USA superpowered again. He swears to imprison or kill his opponents and pardon super-villains in the Barge to join the Guardian superpolice. Pretty topical.
“Float Day” by S. B. Divya. On Float Day, everyone in the world floats based on their ownership of stuff relative to their surrounding community. Those with the least stuff float the most. Nice parable about capitalism and income inequity. Would make an excellent Twilight Zone episode.
“Wake” by Mary Anne Mohanraj. Wonderful story about a middle-aged liberal fighting to maintain all her connections during the pandemic shutdown and BLM protests. Quiet, magical, and poignant.
There are some other fine stories and a few very experimental ones that have more ambition than execution.
March 28, 2025
this might seem like i didn't like it but the last two were so fucking awesome and some of the most creative stories i've ever read.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews