Book Review: The Free People’s Village by Sim Kern

On freeing the human spirit from a late-stage-capitalist cell

My first experience with the work of Sim Kern (they/them) was with their nonfiction book Genocide Bad. Kern is Jewish and nonbinary, lives in Houston, and is active in Jewish Voice for Peace (a group of Jewish people who oppose Israeli state policies towards Palestinians). That book is a reckoning for them, as a member of an oppressed group which shares an ethnicity with a state that is actively engaging in genocide. They work through a whole raft of thorny issues, with great empathy for all involved, and I finished Genocide Bad with a sense of admiration for them. Sim Kern is a moral human being in a world where the human capacity for reason is used in a motivated manner in the service of the worst parts of our nature, and that is hard and brave to be.

It is with that sense of awe and admiration that I turn to their 2023 novel The Free People’s Village. This novel is several things at once: alternate history, political fiction, a deep character study, an exploration of trauma, and an exhortation to hope. And, deep below all of those things that nerds on the internet could write blog posts about, it is a moral book by a moral person.

The alternate history here is built into the background, not advertised, and I didn’t know this book counted as alternate history until I was well invested in the story. The story has a politically salient point of divergence that feels calculated to cause good trouble: this is a world where Al Gore wins Florida in the 2000 election, and from there the presidency. A liberal may think that this would have been the turning point of all America’s ills; not so, writes Kern, for this world is still miserably dystopian albeit technologically advanced. This is an America that has made Gore’s war against global warming a national priority. This takes the form of climate credits that restrict the ability of poor Americans to buy the occasional nice thing while rich people game it, a ready-made excuse to bulldoze Black neighborhoods for not being “eco-friendly” enough, and a shiny new justification for invading Brazil. This America has flying drones with sonic weapons, as well as dog-like drones along the lines of those made by Boston Dynamics. Both of these terrifying weapons are at the disposal of the Houston police department, the city where the novel is set.

Your protagonist is Maddie Ryan, a young white woman, a teacher, who ends up living in a dilapidated apartment building in a poor Black part of Houston because she is infatuated with the man who is its landlord, who wants to turn the building into an anarcho-communist commune. This building rapidly becomes a haven for artists and political activists, and Maddie joins a band that holds regular concerts there. The whole thing is bohemian/utopian while being relatively politically unaware, until the fateful day the City of Houston informs them that the building is being seized to build a monorail line. Maddie, and everyone she knows in the Lab, as they call it, find themselves in alliance with the local Black community, as well as radicals from all over Houston. The Lab becomes an encampment, like Occupy Wall Street but bigger, a symbol to America and to the world that another way of living is possible.

There is something very salient about the fact this story is set not in New York or California or Illinois, but in Texas. These grotty near-future SF stories are usually set in the more famous cities, which incidentally are in Democratic states, states which like to think of themselves as being somewhat insulated from the worst of late-stage capitalism. In Texas, the velvet glove of liberal democracy has been removed from the iron fist. The Texas of our world is a bastion of contemporary American fascism whose authoritarian peculiarities are being exported (the Texas Department of Education has a massive influence on the nation’s textbooks, for one example). In the novel this is all topsy-turvy, with Republicans lukewarmly following Democrats in their War on Climate Change, and much like the other party, are weaponizing it to persecute America’s weakest. On the one hand, this is a rebuke to liberals who think that everything can be solved via institutions, and on the other hand, reminds us that there are plenty of good people, active people, in red states. It is Houston that is the epicenter of a quake that shakes the world.

As so many of Kern’s characters are from minorities, queer or ethnic or in a great many cases both, they have been shackled by the trauma of American bigotry. That’s a theme that runs through this novel, where they are abused by the people that allegedly love them, as well as by a society that allegedly cares for them. The novel brings interpersonal abuse and societal oppression into parallel, and then demonstrates how hard they are to disentangle from one another. For example, Maddie is from a fundamentalist Christian background and rushed into marriage with an abusive man, before divorcing him and winding up with Fish, the aforementioned landlord. But Fish is not blameless, either, nor is he entirely untraumatized. Another such example is a Black character who is under house arrest and is monitored by an implant in his skin, blurring the line, again, between the societal and the domestic.

It’s telling that this novel has plenty of hope, but none of it comes from institutions. There’s very little about what constitutes “legitimate” resistance, or which organizations are truly worthy of your support, and more on what bluntly works. There’s civil disobedience in this novel, and there’s direct action, and both are implicitly stated to be worthy of support if they get the state to back off. On the other hand, the institutions of both local and national government are all basically oppressive forces that only ever make the lives of the Lab’s dwellers worse. Much is made about how Democrats are just as complicit in the national order as Republicans, and there is an argument over this timeline’s 2024 presidential election that will sound familiar to those of us who paid attention to discourse over the one in our own world. When contextualized with Kern’s own discussion of their worldview in Genocide Bad, I feel comfortable describing the philosophy of this novel as anarchist. It is a philosophy where only the people will save themselves, which brings to mind this verse from Charles Hope Kerr’s rendition of The Internationale:

We want no condescending saviors
To rule us from their judgement hall
We workers ask not for their favors
Let us consult for all.
To make the thief disgorge his booty
To free the spirit from its cell
We must ourselves decide our duty
We must decide and do it well.

Kern is not afraid to show the flaws of their characters, as socially disadvantaged as they are. You get an unflinching depiction of poverty, with the addictions and the compromises that it entails. Some people die, and die because of these compromises, but they are never abstracted into statistics. Each act of hurt is an indictment of the systems that made them possible, each moment of suffering another intrusion. Many of these characters are viewed from Maddie’s first-person perspective, as previously stated a white woman, which in theory sounds potentially unpleasant, but Kern is more skillful than that. Maddie is called to account several times, and she has to reckon with her privilege and her ignorance about the lives of those who lack it. Through Maddie you see how a privileged person can become a true ally of the oppressed, and that will be a useful demonstration for a lot of people.

There is a part of me, as I read this book, that wished I were there in the Lab, helping build utopia. Kern depicts a new society being born in great detail—not the detail of dreary transcripts of debates and rules and resource allocations, but rather in the way people act, people behave, people live. It reminded me of a version of the Occupy Wall Street movement as depicted in David Graeber’s The Democracy Project, but rougher around the edges. A whole little society was built there, based on better moral principles than our own. There are big personalities, of course, and people who have not really reckoned with the facts of their privilege, and act in that ignorant way. It’s not perfect, but it feels real, like something that could actually happen if enough of us could just snap out of it, and that is ultimately its glory.

The ending of this novel is not happy, exactly, but nor is it sad, exactly. The grand experiment of the novel ends, as we suspected and indeed dreaded it might, but such grand experiments achieve their grandeur by the fact they inspire further experiments. The denouement feels, again, like something real, plausible, almost inevitable. But even so, this novel inspired a certain swelling in my heart, an uplifting of my soul, that saw that better things are possible. As Cory Doctorow said in Walkaway (a novel with many thematic overlaps with this one, and one that fans of Kern’s may enjoy), “it’s not the fight you win, but the fight you fight.” This novel is, ultimately, honest about the stakes at play when dealing with utopia, about the fact that the fight will continue to be fought long past the point we may hope it is over, but it’s worth fighting anyway, because it’s just. But still, I dream of what people could do, if we woke up like the characters in Kern’s novel.

Reference: Kern, Sim. The Free People's Village [Levine Querido, 2024]

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Book Review: These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart by Izzy Wasserstein

Breaking binaries in a future that feels terrifyingly near

We often talk of the collapse of governments as the collapse of order. We fear anarchy, conflating it with the brutalities of war and genocide and cannibalism and of many other atrocities that the state nominally exists to prevent. When the state recedes, order as defined by the state recedes, and the territory concerned gradually becomes less “legible” to the state. In his book The Art of Not Being Governed, anthropologist James C. Scott talks about how people in these “illegible” areas deliberately acted to prevent the state from encroaching upon them; he argues that they rejected writing itself, or even history itself (conversely, markers of “legibility,” as discussed in his book Seeing Like a State, include surnames, gridded streets, government record-keeping, standardized agriculture, and the like—these were critical parts of the creation of the modern nation-state). Scott talks specifically of the peoples of upland Southeast Asia, but it is a phenomenon that has existed in much broader contexts. One potential form of this phenomenon may be seen in Izzy Wasserstein’s 2024 novella These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart, published by Tachyon Publications.

It is a future that feels terrifyingly near. The ever-weakening functions of the American state are ever receding and ceding power to outright corporate rule. In a blighted, impoverished Kansas City, there is crime, and misery, and utter, utter poverty. Yet there is one little oasis of hope: an anarchist commune that has refurbished a part of the city, whose people live according to mutual aid and consensus decision-making. Seen from today’s neoliberal late-state capitalist hell, it can look almost idyllic.

Then a member of the commune is found dead in her room. The only person willing to go all the way with an investigation is her ex-girlfriend, a former member of the commune who was exiled when a tension between her and the rest of the communards came to a head. Distrusted by her former friends, disowned by her family, and thrown into deep emotional turmoil, Dora, your protagonist, has to solve the murder.

Looking at this story through what Scott called an “anarchist squint,” we see another manifestation of the theme of “legibility” to other people, a theme that serves the narrative’s larger thrust. Dora is a trans woman, expelled by her rich magnate father, who blames her for “killing” his “son.” There’s a very particular contrast between the way the broader world interprets her gender, as opposed to this commune. Much of transphobia is an objection to how trans people blur the boundary between “masculine” and “feminine,” and transphobes hold on for dear life to a “legible” binary to preserve what they feel is epistemic stability. The communards, on the other hand, have no such issues; their conception of gender is a multitude, something diverse, and so they find Dora perfectly legible. She’s not breaking the basic building blocks of social reality to them; she’s just a person, completely comprehensible for that.

Basically every antagonist in this story is someone with money trying to violently contort the world into making sense to them; I am reminded of the American police who have tried to find the leaders of local Food Not Bombs collectives, but cannot comprehend the idea of a leaderless group that is nevertheless organized. Such is the nature of the primary antagonist: to avoid spoiling it, this character is involved in all sorts of underhanded skullduggery in an attempt to make a world that is too clean, too orderly, too “respectable,” too tidy, because that force cannot bear a world that diverts from its preconceived notions. A trans person is thus anathema to this character’s worldview, even to their sense of self and to the bigotry at the core of that worldview.

Another critical part of this novella’s thematic infrastructure is nigh-impossible to discuss without spoiling, but I will try. A crux of the plot is a particular science fiction trope that assumes a certain nature of the self, an assumption commonly made by cis people in most areas of life, and gives it a profoundly trans twist that really uproots your assumptions about this trope. In her afterword, Wasserstein talks about how the science fiction genre has traditionally used speculative elements as metaphors for aspects of the real world. In her own book, she is doing it differently, being more flexible with it, and the end result is phenomenally clever in a way that only a trans writer could do. It’s the sort of new perspective that the “rainbow age” of science fiction (as Elizabeth Bear has been calling it for over a decade) has given us in spades, and it is something the genre needs. What follows is a very discerning, very original take on an old trope.

The world of the commune, in particular, feels something out of the great novels of Ursula K. Le Guin, combining the exploration of gender in The Left Hand of Darkness with the exploration of anarchistic living in The Dispossessed. Wasserstein makes a very similar point to Le Guin regarding the latter: even without formal hierarchy backed by guns, there can still very much be informal hierarchies of popularity. Dora is exiled because she thinks in a different way about a crucial aspect of life on the commune, but the others have come to a consensus that her way of thinking renders her anathema. It’s a wrench thrown into the soaring ideals of utopian science fiction, dealing with this more than Everything for Everyone did. In some sense, the world of Wasserstein’s novella is one still transitioning to the anarchist world of the sort that Emma Goldman feared it would take humanity centuries to create; there is still a lurking tribalism that is combatted internally but I fear can never entirely be excised from the human species. It is ultimately a nuanced portrayal that makes the whole thing more believable.

These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart is a deeply radical book, when you get down to it; it is about rejecting the hegemonic legibility that patriarchal capitalist society demands of us. Why do we need only two genders? Why do we need one ruler? The book shows, not merely tells, of how a newer, better, more tolerant world could actually function, at least in microcosm. It is a story that feels plausible, with a pearl of collective living in the sea of neoliberal misery. It gives me hope, as hard as that is to have these days.

Reference: Wasserstein, Izzy. These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart [Tachyon Publications, 2024].

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Microreview [book]: The Actual Star by Monica Byrne

A cyclical epic about the connections and divisions between us

The Actual Star is a demanding book. It tells three interdependent stories, each a novel in its own right, separated by centuries but connected by reincarnation and by the eternal recurrence of myths. It opens with three maps of the same location, each set in a different era, oriented in a different direction, and containing different landmarks that reflect the passage of colonial devastation and sea level rise. It has a massive glossary at the end, which I recommend you read first, because it explains much of the backstory that the text of the novel proper is content to leave implied. It has entire pages of untranslated dialogues in Spanish, futuristic neo-Spanish, and Belizean Kriol. And at every step it asks you to reevaluate your assumptions about how societies work, how cultures survive, and how people seek their own way of transcendence.

In the year 1012, Ixul and Ajul are the twin heirs of the Tzoyna throne in one of the many Mesoamerican kingdoms that comprise what we call the Maya civilization. Their younger sister Ket starts having prophetic visions that they hope will guide their people to renewed prosperity, but their ascent to the throne coincides with a period of climate change that destabilizes the necessary trust between farmers and rulers.

In the year 2012, American teenager Leah Oliveri flies from her boring frozen town in Minnesota to Belize, the home of her biological father, following an irresistible yet indescribable pull toward a deeper meaning. Right at the time the Maya calendar is turning over a leaf, she becomes the lover of two tourist guides and develops a dangerous fascination with a sacred cave which she believes guards the answers she's looking for.

In the year 3012, after modern civilization has collapsed and humanity has narrowly survived extinction, the dominant social structure is the religion of Laviaja (futuristic neo-Spanish for "The Journey"), a syncretic blend of anarcho-nomadism, Maya myth, and radical sex positivity that reveres Leah Oliveri as a saint and her two one-night-stands as her first apostles. This belief system has kept peace on Earth for centuries, but now is at risk of fossilizing into yet another oppressive institution.

These three plots are braided together in a polyphony full of thematic resonance, where events in one time period are mirrored in the next, a character's prayer in the future is fulfilled in the past, and particular sensory experiences reverberate across the eras at key moments of decision. Even quiet, contemplative scenes bear the tension of multiple threads leading to other characters having the same thought, other conversations wrestling with the same question, other versions of humanity dealing with the same basic yearning.

Yearning is a core theme of this novel. The reader is made aware of it since the very first page, where a quote by C.S. Lewis says, "If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world." That is absolutely not how probabilities work, or how explanations work, or how desires work, or how worlds work, but it's the frame of mind from which the whole story is conceived: the ancient doctrine that this material world is made of imperfect reflections of a more "real" world, and that the purpose of life is to heal the divide between us and that other world. The title of the book refers to the difference between seeing a reflection of a star with our flawed human senses and perceiving the real thing via more direct means. Across the novel, this is expressed through the frequent motif of characters pausing to notice Venus in the sky. Every time it is mentioned, Venus is used as a symbol of the things that are desired but appear unreachable.

Much is made of the condition of Venus and Earth as twin planets, because twins are another motif in the book. Twins appear in Maya creation myths as the heroic founders of humanity, and twins reappear in each era of The Actual Star as symbols of the fundamental tragedy of human life: that we are so much like each other, yet are irrevocably unique and separate, that we desire togetherness, but the universe tends toward increasing separation. Every variation of this is explored, from the trope of quarreling twins separated at birth, to the mythic cosmology of a spherical universe cleft in halves, to the enmity directed inward in the act of self-cutting. A cut can be understood as an abyss separating two parts, but also as a passage connecting them. The sacred cave that connects the three narratives is clearly a wound in the earth, a wound turned into its own world. The most dramatic extrapolation of this motif is the notion of afterlife in Laviaja, whose devotees hope to be snatched into the other world through a cut in the fabric of reality.

Now one may wonder why they would want to leave this world, if Laviaja has supposedly turned it into a utopia. But no utopia can satisfy every wish. In the pacifistic anarchy of 3012, nation states no longer exist. In their stead, each individual builds their own identity from three key components, the terms for which are an imagined evolution from real Spanish words. "Genéra" corresponds to gender identity, except that the options available are named after cardinal points. "Manéra" is aesthetic presentation, more or less like the way you can tell apart an emo from a hipster from a furry from a ganguro, but expanded to include every possible aesthetic, even ancient Romans, mermaids, or Swan Lake Odettes. Finally, "preféra" is this world's version of the top/bottom axis, which is a choice open to all because humans in this future are genetically engineered for fully functional hermaphroditism (another instance of the ancestral yearning for the reunion of split halves).

Where it gets dystopic is in the extreme way Laviaja handles social relations. As the book itself declares, "peace needs enforcement," and later, "peace requires sacrifice," which is a nicer way of saying that any sufficiently coordinated anarchy is indistinguishable from a state. I wouldn't want to live under a regime where anyone who sees my face can instantly know every conversation I've ever had and every place I've ever been and exactly what I like to do in bed; where a world-spanning computing network dictates what job I'll do that day and whom I can gift my possessions; where the entire world can cast me out for speaking in favor of lasting human connection. A world where privacy is frowned upon as a form of hoarding, where the justice system is literally panoptic, is not a very desirable world. Laviaja was founded originally as a movement of climate refugees, who became the majority of the human population after unchecked exploitation of resources reached the point of unsustainability. The problem is that emergency measures devised to deal with an extreme situation became codified as the norm of everyday living. That is the conundrum the protagonists face in 3012: must they continue a lifestyle adapted to near-extinction conditions, now that human survival has been ensured? Just because it is the nature of the universe to break apart and break away, must they hold on to nothing?

The sections set in 1012 present a horrifying alternative: instead of escaping this world, you could submit to the captivity in which we are all born. The scenes in the royal palace describe the sacred ball game of the Maya people as a ritualized ratification of the social contract whereby some are always fated to win and some are always fated to be sacrificed.

The sections set in 3012 suggest a different way: we cannot pretend that change won't happen. What we can do is to consciously steer it. Otherwise, we no longer belong to the order of things. We may as well not be in the world.

Rejection of this world by comparison to a perfect afterlife is nothing new. In her recent video interview with John Scalzi, Byrne described the religio-political structure of Laviaja in these terms: "it's as if the entire planet is one nomadic monastery." That choice of wording points to the danger at the core of this system: for all its emphasis on individual freedom, it lends itself too easily to dogmatism. In each era of the story, we see the harmful effect of rigid social rules, which the reader can infer by the degree of access allowed to the sacred cave, a stand-in for access to ultimate fulfillment: in 1012, only the royal family can reach it; in 2012, only those with disposable income and lucky passports can; in 3012, it is supposedly open to everyone, but no one is allowed to stay. Time and again, the yearning for union clashes against the reality of separation, but it is separation which makes desire possible.

As a story about the way all things break apart and break away, it is remarkable that The Actual Star holds together until the end. Byrne displays here an expert mastery of the techniques of the craft, using repeated themes as a vehicle for unique characters to come alive, letting their choices speak the points and counterpoints of a long discussion spanning centuries of history. The plot transmutes the cruelty of empire into the joy of perpetual diaspora, the rudeness of the tourist gaze into a celebration of impermanence, the disjointedness of an incomplete historical record into a tool of narrative creativity. Just like Leah was said to have disappeared in the cave, but actually found transcendence, just like the Maya people are said to have disappeared in history, but actually survive in new ways in the real world, you may feel at times that you lose yourself in this book. What you find at the end of the passage is unique to you. It depends on the god of the place where you are while you experience it.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10.

Bonuses: +2 for the skillful interweaving and rhyming between the three timelines, +2 for numerous poetic descriptions that serve as an effective complement to the narration.

Penalties: −1 because Leah, the central character of the book, the foundation for a major religion of mutual help and acceptance, the pivot around which the entire history of the planet turns, too often comes off as an insufferably fastidious brat, −1 because too many dialogues and choices in the 2012 sections are evidently inserted because the plot demands that they happen, −3 because, for a novel that relies so heavily on Spanish, it commits numerous orthographic and semantic errors in representing the Spanish of the present day. (The ones that are most impactful to the plot are the false friend actual, which means "current" or "up-to-date," not "real;" and the noun jugador, which does derive from the verb jugar, but does not share its dual meaning. Jugador only means "player" of a sport or a game, not "player" of a theatrical role. Less crucially, but more irritatingly, "vámanos" is not even a word that exists in Spanish. The correct spelling is "vámonos.")

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Byrne, Monica. The Actual Star [Harper Voyager, 2021].

MIcroreview [anthology]: AnarchoSF, Vol. 1

Uneven, as anthologies tend to be. 

I am stating out the outset that I’m probably not all that qualified to review the anthology AnarchoSF: Science Fiction and the Stateless Society, Vol. 1. Perhaps I am indirectly qualified: I am familiar with a bit of anarchist theory and history. I read 1984 and Brave New World, some Philip K. Dick and Iain M. Banks. And I did review Anarchy Comics a few weeks back. Plus, someone’s got to review this stuff. Especially the anthologies.

I wish I could say I enjoyed AnarchoSF. There were a few good pieces in here. Ursulla Pflug’s odd little story “The Water Man,” set in an anarchizing New Orleans, warns of the lingering temptations of cash—“jazz”—and the power it bestows, i.e. you can buy untainted water. Ricardo Feral’s humorous take on trendy leftwing factionalism, “Silent Night,” tells the story of one old hick’s ingenious seasonal solution to the drone problem. “The Sea Books” by Chris Bird, though perhaps thematically a bit out of place, is a wonderful allegory of the power of knowledge—hundreds of thousands of books washing ashore a seaside village—that reads like a tongue-in-cheek homage to early Lovecraft. 

The anthology included two classics culled from the public domain. Philip K. Dick’s “The Last of the Masters” is an unsurprisingly unromantic take on how awesome anarchism will be—once we finally kill the last of the robot bureaucrats. Though far less readable than Dick’s story, E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” is perhaps one the most ominously relevant dystopian tales that I have ever read—all the more remarkable as it was written in 1909. 

The remaining entries in AnarchoSF were far more forgettable. Not terrible, just forgettable—as is the case with most anthologies. With consistent content, however, this format could work. I do like the inclusion of classic short fiction, particularly from the public domain. Some more nonfiction, more art, some comics. This could work. Maybe. Either way, valiant effort.

The Math

Objective score: 4/10

Bonuses: +1 for Sea Books and +1 for Dick

Penalties: -1 for making me read a poem

Nerd coefficient: 5/10

***

Dana, Rick (ed.) AnarchoSF: Science Fiction and the Stateless Society Vol. 1 [Obsolete! Press, 2014]

Microreview [Comics] Anarchy Comics

Kinney, Jay (ed.). Anarchy Comics [PM Press]

The Meat

I’m not sure when I first heard of Anarchy Comics, but I’m guessing it was sometime between 1994 and 1996—that is, during the period when I was reading a lot of comics and books on anarchism and during the period when there was no internet. Had I had internet access, I would have tracked down an issue or two, or at least have learned something more of its existence. It was anarchism in comic book form, after all. The 17-year old me would not only have loved reading such a book, he would have needed to read it. But alas, I never got my hands on a single copy. And then I graduated from a fascination with anarchism into ironic political detachment. That is, I became a political sociologist.

But things get collected and reprinted. Many months back, I was at the store to buy our beloved editor a birthday gift when I saw the Anarchy Comics trade. I read it immediately. I planned to review it immediately. And then I procrastinated and got out of blogging for a few weeks—or something along those lines. Here it is, six or so months later and I've finally got around to it.

The review: It’s worth your money. Yes, yes. Irony.

Editor Jay Kinney came up with the idea of Anarchy Comics in the late seventies, in part to join his passion for comics with his passion for anarchist philosophy, in part as a way to make sense of the unceremonious demise of the New Left on the world stage. And it reads like the late seventies, full of punk vigor and utter disdain for the right and the left. Though it’s a relic of its time, it is nonetheless a very important and very entertaining piece of comics history. It’s often pretty funny too.

Kinney deserves praise not merely for corralling an international gang of cartoonists into contributing to the book, but for his own contributions. He and Paul Mavrides created some of the best and funniest strips in Anarchy. “Kultur Documents,” a bizarre mélange of a pictogram workers rebellion and a punk spoof on Archie Comics—seriously—is perhaps the best piece in the collection, sardonic and bizarre. “Armageddon Outtahere” may also possibly be the best piece in the collection for the very same reasons, with the added bonus of pondering competing claims to ownership of the apocalypse. These two alone may be worth the price of the book.

Among Anarchy Comics’ better entries are its historical strips. The French duo Épistoloer and Volny provide a number of historical sketches of anarchism, examining the Kronstadt Mutiny following the Bolshevik Revolution and the Rustauds’ Revolt in 16^th Century Alsace. Another piece Steve Stiles’s “Wobblies!”, meshes the history of the American IWW union with his own experience of questioning at the hands of US military intelligence. Unsurprisingly, Spain Rodriguez provides the best of the historical strips with his pair of entries on the Spanish Civil War, “Blood and Sky” and “Durruti”; a brief biographical sketch fn Ukrainian anarchist Nestor Makhno, and “1871,” a look at the failed Paris Commune. (His “Roman Spring,” exploring the generational conflicts of the Italian “Years of Lead” during the 1970s, unfortunately, is rather superficial and romanticized story, heavy on melodrama.) Reading these made me wish he’d have continued with such historical work on anarchism—and maybe I should finally buy Che.

But as with most anthologies of any kind, some of the material in Anarchy Comics is forgettable. Much of this reads like the writings of unfocused youthful agitators: willfully naïve and childishly hostile, overflowing with equal parts optimism and anger. And ultimately pointless—as editor Kinney admits, to an extent, in his introduction. From a pedagogical perspective, more thoughtful pieces on anarchist philosophy and its development would have improved the book considerably. Though Anarchy Comics was designed to specifically avoid long-winded exegeses on obscure tracts and sterile debates over irrelevant minutiae of good theory—a hallmark of leftism—such materials would have been beneficial for the novice militant. The collection does include a handful of terse theoretical pieces—Harry S. Robins’s “Anarchy Panarchy” being the best, as well as funniest—though I would have preferred more. I suppose I’ll have to make a trip to the library.

Part of anarchism’s allure—and part of the reason for why it has historically been seen as such a threat—stems from its association with violence, i.e. the propaganda by the deed. Marx derided his anarchist adversaries as “alchemists of revolution”: they believed, he argued, that they could jumpstart revolution through daring acts of violence and assassination, thus avoiding all the work of raising consciousnesses and patient mobilization. Anarchy Comics certainly has its fair share of appeals to violence, often adolescently expressed. While violence in comics may be commonplace, enjoining readers to perpetrate the mayhem themselves is often frowned upon. And it’s hard to imagine anyone getting away with a fictional account of the president’s assassination in this post-9/11 world. But it was a simpler time.

Well, it’s late and I have class to teach early in the morning. Plus, I’d like to get in a few pages of Bakunin before bed. Maybe there’s something to this anarchist business after all.

The Math

Objective score: 8/10

Penalties: -1 for the bad strips

Bonuses: +1 for sending me to the library; +1 for "free kittens" (p. 145)

Nerd coefficient: 9/10