Applying Ourselves: 30 Reading Experiments

From Applied African Speculative Fiction: A Toolkit (Ping Press 2026).

Here are thirty reading experiments. Choose one or two, and try them on any story in this collection. Whichever experiment you choose, strive to be specific and detailed. And if you have the time, take your time.

1. Read the story, and arrange a discussion group. Ideally print it out and make notes by hand. Come prepared with three questions: one question about the plot, one question about the technology in the story, and one question about the way the story is told.

2. Just read it. Don’t try to ‘apply’ it to anything. Let it seep into you. Perhaps it will be back in some form, some day, perhaps not. Perhaps you will recognise it, perhaps not.

3. Box up the magic.  Identify elements that you think are too fantastical ever to happen in the real world. Make a list of their narrative inputs and effects. Then rename each one ‘black box #1,’ ‘black box #2’ etc. A black box, in this context, is where we know the inputs and the outputs, but not what happens inside. Discuss these black boxes. Treat them as placeholders for events that cannot currently be foreseen or even properly imagined, but that really are possible.

4. What is governed in the story? Identify the forms of governance that take place. How might the story unfold under different governance arrangements?

5. What is evaluated in this story? Identify acts or processes of categorisation, evaluation, tagging, measurement, or similar. What would happen if these were different?

6. Draw the story as a diagram, or a series of diagrams. For example, use systems thinking to map the systems in the story. Identify key actors, institutions, infrastructures, resources, feedback loops, pressures, and points of breakdown or control. Think about how different parts of the story’s world interact, and how a change in one part of the system might ripple through the others.

7. Find an intervention point. If you wanted to change the world of this story without controlling everything, where would you intervene? Identify one plausible leverage point: a law, standard, subsidy, interface, procurement rule, bottleneck, union, dataset, piece of infrastructure, etc. Why there? (You could look up Donella Meadows’ leverage points for inspiration. Often, readers will jump to social norms, mindsets, paradigms, and education—if only people saw the world differently, they’d act differently! Maybe that is true, but worldviews are as resilient as the reflection of the moon –  a temporary shattering has no lasting impact. Worldviews can be difficult to shift, and assuming otherwise can lead to mere wishful thinking. As a challenge, try not to make this your intervention point).

8. Reimagine this speculative fiction story as a different kind of speculative fiction story. Relocate it within a different storytelling tradition. This could involve switching modes of speculation. There are many types of speculative fiction. Some stories build counterfactual institutions in breathtaking detail. Some stories erase detail, like a corrosion cast, revealing the vascular system of reality. 

9. Triangulate. Write down one thing that is true in the world of the story, but not the real world. Write down a corresponding thing that is true in the real world, but not the story’s world. You can do this just once, or several times. Then, for each pair, write down a third possibility—a place where both things are false (or both things are neither true nor false). Then begin to imagine that world.

10. Remove the fantastical elements. What is the rest of the story about? Could this show us what the story is ‘really’ about?

11. What’s on your mind? What’s in the news? What consultation is soon to close, or petition is gathering signatures, or open call for evidence has just appeared, or problem is plaguing your team? Choose a currently controversial topic within law or policy, or within your professional practice—however unrelated it may seem. Map out the main different positions on this controversy. Then use the story to inspire new positions, or new angles on the existing positions. Give yourself to responding in a loose, associative way. Treat the story like going for a walk, something you might do to clear your head, to gain a fresh perspective. Try to let it change your thinking, even if you can’t exactly explain how it did.

12. Read the story in a ‘paranoid’ way—try to uncover the ideological assumptions, especially those that are aligned with oppressive power (e.g. colonialism, extractivism, racism or patriarchy), even if the story opposes that oppression at a surface level. For this exercise, you are not very interested in the author’s intentions. What do linguistic and storytelling conventions make it easy to say, or hard to say? Who is visible and who isn’t, who acts and who doesn’t, who speaks and who is spoken for? What is treated as normal, natural, or inevitable? What is simplified, ignored, or left out? What associations do words carry, even if (or especially if) they are the obvious or natural way of expressing something? How does the story shape what seems plausible, possible, or desirable?

13. Read the story in a ‘reparative’ way—try to read in a way where you seek pleasure, and more pleasure, and are open to being surprised, in horrifying ways as well as intensely pleasurable ways. A reparative reading asks what you can take and use from a story, not just what it gets wrong. Pay attention to moments of care, curiosity, humour, or resilience. Be open to receiving gifts from the text—an image, a feeling, a question, a way of seeing—that you can carry forward into your own thinking or practice.

14. Can you read the story in a ‘reparanoiative’ way?—our invented word for an interpretation that is both paranoid and reparative.

15. Use wordplay to come up with meanings that almost definitely were not intended by the author. “‘Every Centre is an Ant”’: perhaps every Centaur is an ANT? Centaur: half horse, half human, or more metaphorically, a human-AI hybrid workflow in which a person and an AI system collaborate, combining human judgment with machine speed or pattern recognition (see also Cory Doctorow on ‘reverse centaurs’). Actor-Network Theory (ANT): an approach from Science and Technology Studies that treats humans and non-humans (e.g. AI systems, data sets, institutions) as actors in networks, where outcomes emerge from their relationships rather than any single agent.

16. How could we make events in this story actually happen? If there are things that are impossible, what is the closest possible thing we could substitute? Stretch goal: actually do it.

17. Situate the story in relation to Africanfuturism and solarpunk. How does it contribute to, extend, challenge, undermine, or subvert either or both of these?

18. Read the story together with some theory. For example, read the story through the lens of Afropessimism (Frank B. Wilderson III, Jared Sexton, Saidiya Hartman), necropolitics (Achille Mbembe), postcolonial epistemology (Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí), world systems theory (Samir Amin), Black fugitivity (Fred Moten), convivial technology and decomputing (Ivan Illich and Dan McQuillan), pluriversal politics (Arturo Escobar), or something else. What doesn’t quite fit? What would have to shift in the theory itself—its assumptions, its scale and scope, its priorities and vibes—for the theory to fully account for the story? Often the best encounters between a story and a theory are two-way: the theory doesn’t just explain the story. Instead, you end up seeing both the story and the theory differently, perhaps inventing new theories and telling new stories. 

19. Generate opposing viewpoints, and then go beyond them. Do some research, and find two philosophers, scholars, theorists, or just clever or wise people you know, who would take different views on some aspect of the story. Discuss it. Then, instead of assuming the best answer is ‘somewhere in the middle,’ try this next step. Choose the less wrong perspective, and ask what it would mean to radicalise it.

20. Conduct a kind of immanent critique of the story. Read the story ‘against’ itself. Use the story itself to generate some kind of criteria or standard against which to evaluate the story.

21. Fork the story. Identify a key decision somewhere in the story, ideally near the middle. What would happen if a different decision had been made?

22. Explore the lacunae. Look for the gaps and silences. Look for what’s missing. For example, choose one institution, technology, or social arrangement in the story. List the hidden assumptions, practices, infrastructures, or other factors that make it possible. And/or identify the absent stakeholders: who is affected but not represented in the story’s visible decision-making? And/or pick one object, service, or technological system in the story and trace what must sit behind it, e.g. materials, labour, logistics, waste, energy, land, data, standards, finance, communication, shared understandings, social and cultural practices.

23. Stress-test the solutions. Find a moment where something is solved. It could be a big problem or a small one. Think about what could go wrong. 

24. Translate the story into a policy memo, and observe what gets lost. Summarise the story as if briefing a policy audience (or some other audience, e.g. innovation lab, campaign group, regulator). What did that format encourage you to omit (or to add)? 

25. Use backcasting. If the story is set in the future, imagine what was happening a couple years earlier. And then a few more years earlier. And then even earlier, all the way to the present. Try to draw a plausible pathway from where we are now, to the world of the story.

26. Write a risk assessment for some aspect of the story.

27. Put yourself in the story as a researcher. Write a grant proposal, seeking funding to research something.

28. Map the story’s economy. What was paid for, during the story or before the story began? How was it paid for, who bore the cost, and what forms did payment take?

29. Brainstorm as many interpretations as you can (see “Burning Down the Solarpunk Data Centre”). Then ask: Which of these says the most interesting things about the story? Which of these says the most interesting things about the world we live in? Which of these says the most interesting things about the future? Choose one interpretation, and develop it further.

30. How do we go beyond merely imagining? What keeps "alternative" approaches as merely alternatives? Might imagining alternatives sometimes help to prop up the status quo? Read the story, and explore what you (or others you care about) oppose, resist, want to abolish or to imagine differently. Then discuss how our identities can be bound up in what we define ourselves against. The thing we oppose is often also the thing that organises us. Is there a voice inside you that says: What would I be without this struggle? How does it show up? (See “Burning Down the Solarpunk Data Centre.” Do we sometimes wish for Memory Boxes, just so we can burn them down?). You could also go beyond the psychological, and think about the economic and institutional. In what ways is it sometimes in our interests to not achieve the things we want to achieve? Perhaps to make progress, but never quite arrive? Can we change all this?

Lake of Darkness x Nexus of Joy

Sci-fi author: I created the Joy Nexus to show how a better society is within reach - sure, it’s not perfect, but it’s a start. Readers: The Joy Nexus is a chilling dystopian warning. We must never let it happen

— Jo Lindsay Walton (@jolwalton.bsky.social) 3 January 2025 at 10:14

Adam Roberts’ Lake of Darkness (2024) offers a highly automated, post-work, post-scarcity ambiguous utopia. 

These kinds of utopias are probably by now familiar to many SF readers, so Roberts has latitude to bring his own distinctive twists and emphases.

Social organisation is based on ‘fandoms.’ The society is mostly post-literate (or at least post-typography, accustomed to interacting with texts by speaking and listening to AIs). There is a lot of attention given to variety and mobility:

These two things – a vast, almost endless proliferation of different societies, different human-climates, different modes of living – and the rapid and easy ability to pass on to any of them – constitute the key to our contemporary utopia. [...] For some, just knowing that they can leave is enough to ensure their happiness wherever they are. But though human utopia reaches across thousands of worlds and habitats, it cannot reach everywhere – or to be precise, its core quality, the guarantor of viability, the open exit door, cannot be accessed everywhere.

Then Satan, imprisoned in a black hole, recapitulates the argument that toil is necessary for humans to live meaningful lives. 

Your utopia. It’s all a bit trivial, don’t you think? You’re all just playing games, as children do. None of you are really doing anything, really achieving anything. Where is your Homer? Your Shakespeare, your Beethoven, your Chi Lin, your Yin Lui? You’re paddling around your paddling pool with the puffed-up armbands still on your pudgy little arms. Don’t you think it’s time to put all that behind you? Let me out, and the baby-comforts of your collective existence would be demolished. There would be suffering, I don’t deny it. But without that friction nothing truly great, nothing truly enduring is possible. Something something cuckoo-clocks, something something Borgias, Leonardo and the Renaissance. 

There is a hiss on the word “Renaissance”: Roberts really does seem to bend over backwards to remind us that this argument, MADE BY THE DEVIL, may be a dodgy one. 

Something something cucko-clocks, something something Borgias, Leonardo and the Renaissance. This is a reference to The Third Man, and the (inaccurate but great) zinger that five hundred years of Swiss democracy and peace produced nothing but the cuckoo clock. The devil's half-assedness here is the point: the argument is so familiar, it barely needs to be said, is always on the tip (or tips) of your tongue.

So I don't think we're really meant to come away from Lake of Darkness reinvigorated and pumped for more scarcity and more work ethic. However, the Joy Nexus effect -- whereby contemporary readers are predisposed to read all utopias as dystopian -- is as strong as ever.

"Not all Utopias are Utopian," comments one Amazon reviewer. Another ponders "whether the pursuit of happiness without realy investment in working for it has any external value." (Makes you think is a thought-terminating cliche). On Goodreads, one reviewer describes the book as "critiquing utopianism," while another comments: "Also typical are the sort of general conclusions of the author that we see in other novels, namely that utopia infantilizes humanity and people need toil and suffering to live meaningful lives."

Maybe we're already post-literate? Or is it just me? Or is it possible that Roberts, like Milton, is a true poet and of the devil's party without knowing it?

I really liked Lake of Darkness in the end, one of my favourites by him of those I've read. A little infuriating.

Expertise and class consciousness

I wonder if terms like expertise and specialist knowledge could shake up a more Marxist terminology of class consciousness, reification, praxis, false consciousness, and ideology?

The idea that capitalism objectifies human labour and relationships—making constructs like money, markets, and institutions appear natural and inevitable—was a big deal for 20th century Western Marxism. Reification ('thingification'), it was argued, established an illusion of inevitability. It made systemic change feel impossible. Understanding that things are actually not inevitable is the first step toward actually changing them.

I guess this did blow my mind at some point. But today, that critique feels less urgent. Does anyone really think any of this is inevitable? Don’t most people already know that commodities, institutions, and systems are produced by human activity, whether or not the specific people can be seen? Isn’t the air thick with comparisons? We operate in a hyper-visible world, where models and practices are endlessly contrasted. The alternatives are already real—just very unevenly distributed. 

Pretty much anything could be different from what it is. Things are quite different year to year: centrist-liberal hegemony has truly slipped, the Overton window is screeching through space, national borders are fragile, climate change can be seen and felt, disruptive tech start-ups absorb millions of investment dollars and then expire, genocide is live-streamed by the murderers and the murdered, and the destruction of fine towering cities is available as before and after pictures. The status quo doesn't describe anything.

Yet so what? Putting weight on mystification has become unfashionable. With good reason, too. It verges on a patronising insistence that we are all dupes, missing the significance of our own lived experience. It risks slipping into bad conspiracy theory, where reality is nothing but a rival fandom. In its most reductive form, it invites the caricature of a self-satisfied Marxist bro (#JeSuis) splaining to you what your feelings really mean. 

Lots of people have lots of good reasons for believing untrue things in our day-to-day lives. Beliefs do lots of things—emotionally, socially, aesthetically—besides model reality. It feels like the challenge is no longer exposing violence as constructed, but surviving it despite this awareness. Contingency is well-known, because precarity is well-known.

Yet I also wonder if some of the original critique can be repaired?

For me, focusing on how expertise or specialist knowledge could be radically reconfigured feels far less banal. There’s a living provocation here: the idea that areas of practice we take as determined by the specific properties of the things involved—medicine, engineering, music, economics, governance, biology, something like that—might not have to be constrained in the ways they always have been. 'Forms of practice are, typically, more interesting than states of consciousness,' writes Göran Therborn in 'Why Some Classes Are More Successful Than Others' (2012).

I feel like expert practice can carry an aura of inevitability which social and economic institutions and systems don’t really carry. What might this or that expertise look like if it were genuinely democratic, collective, adaptive, and responsive to the diverse needs and perspectives of those it serves? 

How might we understand class consciousness as expertise?

An anxiety about the proper role of expertise, I’d suggest, has even been at the bottom of a lot of the longstanding disagreement around state abolition, and therefore the left's internal spectrum between anarchism and socialism. 

‘The differences between revolutionary dictatorship and statism are superficial,’ wrote Bakunin in Statism and Anarchy (1873). ‘Fundamentally they both represent the same principle of minority rule over the majority in the name of the alleged “stupidity” of the latter and the alleged “intelligence” of the former.’ 

A big part of what is at stake in seizing the state, or steering well clear of the state, is to do with expertise. Does the revolutionary movement — whether that is the proletariat as for Marx, or some kind of Leninist vanguard, or a bunch of constructivist anarchists being the change we want to see in the world, or the peasantry of the Global South, or ex-Leninists getting into Indigenous cosmologies, or some other coalition or multitude — does the revolutionary movement know something that everybody else doesn’t? Does whatever teaches you to prepare and deliver a revolution also teach you enough to sustain it? Does it perhaps strip you of it? What do you do with these strange moments, which may be collective or solitary, dramatic or quiet, when you suddenly find yourself standing in the halls of power, wondering what it is that you thought you knew?

Gender, democracy, and SFF literary awards

Polina Levontin and I wrote about gender, democracy, and SFF literary awards (the Hugos, the BSFA Awards, my own Sputnik experiment, plus a cameo by the Clarke Awards) in an article published by Foundation (thank you Paul March-Russell). Join up here and/or email me if you'd like a copy.

Here's an abstract:

This article explores cultural and design dimensions of non-governmental voting systems, focusing on science fiction and fantasy (SFF) literary awards voted for by fans, via three case studies: the Hugo Awards, the British Science Fiction Awards, and the Sputnik Award. The design of such voting systems needs to juggle a range of goals, one of which is fairness with regard to gender — acknowledging that ‘fairness’ is not straightforward to define, particularly given such awards are embedded within broader gender inequalities. Our analysis on the available data suggests that men have been more likely than women to vote for works by men, and also more likely to vote in ways that amplify the influence of men’s votes under an Alternative Vote System. We suggest that SFF awards are cultural spaces which lend themselves to experimentation with new democratic forms, and briefly offer potential sources of inspiration. Just as SFF has aspired to be a space to think about the future of technology, gender, the environment, and many other issues, SFF award spaces could be spaces for thinking about the future of democracy. We also offer recommendations to SFF awards designers and communities to address gender bias (emphasising reflective practices over technical solutions), and to continue to explore how aesthetic and cultural values and identities are constructed and negotiated within SFF award spaces, and beyond. 

And some diagrams (though I think these were very slightly updated in the published version)!

And here's a snippet:

Preferences are not the only gendered aspect of voting for literary awards. For example, we discovered that men tend to rank more options on the ballot. This offers some weak evidence suggesting that men are more likely to vote for novels they have not read. The 2020 Award featured a particularly long shortlist, and men were 80% more likely than women to rank more than six nominees. The 2020 Awards shortlist was announced on 18 February, with voting beginning shortly thereafter and closing on 3 April. More votes per person for male voters might also reflect gendered differences in reading habits throughout the year, if men read more and more varied-in-style science fiction than women (see e.g. Atkinson (2016) for an exploration of gender and class aspects of reading taste in the UK). However, extremely low-ranked preferences (the 7th-10th places) are unlikely to exert influence on the outcomes. 

Men’s tendency to vote for more authors per voter amplifies statistical differences in correlations between female and male voters. If men are more likely to vote for books they have not read, this would make their choices less reflective of their true taste, explaining why their preferences appear less correlated than women’s. However, more omnivorous reading could also have a similar statistical effect. Both explanations could be true simultaneously: within this voting community, men may be more likely to vote for books they have not read, and may read more widely (hence voting for more of the books they have read). 

Footnote: 

It is important to emphasise that the gendered reading dynamics within BSFA voters, drawn largely from the British public, may not be representative of the gendered reading dynamics of the British public as a whole. A higher percentage of women read daily than men do, and a lower percentage of women never read compared to men.

 

 

Science fiction vs. left melancholy (round one)

Part one of my series on science fiction and left melancholy is up at the Ancillary Review of Books.

Then there is the more playful, fetish version of horny left melancholy: it is humiliating to always lose, to be a squirming little worm, with no general strikes and no governments. 

It asks: could speculative fiction be considered left joy, and a kind of antidote to left melancholy? It talks about Walter Benjamin, Wendy Brown, Octavia Butler, adrienne maree brown, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Seo-Young Chu, Darko Suvin and a few others.

Critical design fiction and the Torment Nexus

The Routledge Handbook of AI and Literature, edited by Genevieve Lively and Will Slocombe, will be out in December. I've got a chapter in it, offering a thunderously gloomy assessment of Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan's AI 2041: Ten Visions of Our Future. I don't mean to be like this, I obviously fell into a cauldron of Adorno when I was a baby.

The chapter also offers the concept of "critical design fiction." Chen’s intro to AI 2041 suggests that science fiction has the ‘capacity to serve as a warning’ but also that ‘every future we wish to create, we must first learn to imagine.’  Critical design fiction is my attempt to somewhat formalise and test this idea. Critical design fiction would be fiction which:

• adjusts the probabilities that what it represents will occur, 
• if it had been written differently, it would have adjusted those probabilities differently,  
• decreases the probability of something it represents occuring, OR could have decreased its probability if it had been written differently. 

By ‘what it represents’, I'm talking about the general type of events or states of affairs, rather than the specific details of what the characters do or experience. So although it brings some precision, there is plenty of room for interpretation and contention. Similarly, I haven't tried to formalise the difference between 'the same story written differently' and a 'different story.'

Why am I so interested in 'decreasing the probability' of things? Critical design fiction is in part a response to science fiction's 'Don't Build the Torment Nexus' problem. 

The chapter, by the way, got far too long, and so half of it budded off into a separate essay: 'Machine Learning in Contemporary Science Fiction,' over at The SFRA Review.

Massive thank-you to Genevieve and Will for their thoughtful and patient edits. The AI and Literature handbook has a formidable academic publisher price, so this is one to ask your library to order. If you are desperate to read something in it and can't get access, let me know and I'll see if there's anything I can do.

Vimes' 'Boots' Theory

I have a chapter included in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to British Utopian Literature and Culture since 1945, edited by Caroline Edwards, which looks at Terry Pratchett's Night Watch and Making Money. It touches on a brilliant nugget from Men at Arms.

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness.

I write in the chapter:

[...] Here it is worth noting that Vimes’s “Boots” theory is wrong. At least it is overstated: “The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.” This is not the reason but a reason, and a minor one at that. Vimes leaves out the basics: primitive accumulation, extraction of surplus value, return on capital.

Vimes argues that “the reason that the rich were so rich… was because they managed to spend less money.” In other words, he thinks the rich stay rich because they can afford to invest in quality, long-lasting goods, while the poor are trapped in a cycle of buying cheap things that break. This is true in a narrow sense, but it’s not the big reason why wealth is so unequally distributed.

The big reason is: the rich own capital, and the poor do not. Vimes leaves out history. Land and resources were hoarded, often by force ("primitive accumulation"), and the unfairness was passed down through generations, often getting bigger and bigger ("accumulation"). Long ago, people who had farmed, hunted, and gathered for centuries were suddenly told—by men with swords—that the land was no longer theirs. Instead of living off it, they now had to work for those who claimed to own it. That was the beginning of a system that still exists today.

Under capitalism, workers create more value than they’re paid for—this extra value goes to the owners, not the workers. And once someone owns land, factories, or businesses, they can make money simply by having them (as well as whatever they get from working), while workers have to keep working just to survive. No matter how hard they labour, they will never earn as much as those who sit back and collect rent, interest, and dividends.

So while Vimes is right that being poor is expensive in the short term, he misses the bigger picture. The poor aren’t poor just because they can’t afford durable goods. They're poor because of capital accumulation. And once wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few, it stays there—not because of clever shopping, but because of ownership itself.

Back to the chapter:

However, if Vimes’s theory were to have captured the main reason for poverty, then neoliberalism would have an easy and effective solution: improved financial inclusion. This is precisely what Vetinari and Moist oversee in Making Money. New paper fiat currency is inserted into the money supply as micro-loans. In this respect, the idea that “to back the currency [...] [y]ou just needed the city” is slyly equivocal. On the one hand, “the city” suggests the people of the city, workers and entrepreneurs like Dibbler, as well as the communities and material infrastructures in which they are embedded. Ankh-Morpork is a city-state, and “the city” also suggests the government: Vetinari backing the currency with his sovereign power to detain. Finally, the City is also the colloquial term for the UK’s financial services sector, including investment banks like JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Barclays and HBSC. Dibbler may be free to participate in the city that “turns worthless gold into … everything,” but his freedom depends upon “the Silence of the Law,” and that silence depends on his usefulness to the Discworld version of financialisation. [...]

Out now: Utopia on the Tabletop

It's out! Utopia on the Tabletop. A big glowing purple brick of itself, mixed with something else.

Featuring Alice Duke, Tyler Brunette, Tyler Brunette, Asu İnci Sert, Grace A.T. Worm, Ben Platt, Vivek Santayana, Emma French, Kelsey Paige Mason, Jess Wind, Mark Rohtmaa-Jackson, Allan Hughes, Simon O'Sullivan, Ruth Catlow, Tova Gerge, Maurits W. Ertsen, Siân Adiseshiah, Kellynn Wee, Doug Geisler, Gabriel Caetano Barbosa, Paul Czege, and far too much of me. Exploring games including The Book of Cairn, Arium: Create, Paranoia, Dungeons & Dragons, The Treasure at the End of the Dungeon is an Escape From This Dungeon and We Will Never Escape From This Dungeon, Dialect, Masks, Dungeons & Dragons, Mellan himmel och hav, The Quiet Year, and more.

Utopia on the Tabletop

Utopia on the Tabletop is poking its monstrous rainbow snout into the world.

The online open access edition of the collection is now available on Ping Press. We won't be making a big noise about it until the print edition is available as well (hopefully soon). 

But in the meanwhile, here it is. A few years in the making, bursting with essays, interviews, and more, on the topic of utopia and tabletop roleplaying games. Gratitude and props to all the contributors and others who have helped it along the way.

Branch + Pause

Branch is a magazine about building a sustainable and just internet. I have a little piece in issue #8, touching on topics like measurement, moratoriums, and degrowth.