Books Short Fiction Spotlight

Must Read Short Speculative Fiction: April 2025

This month’s stories have a little god murder, some necromancy, and some brain swapping…

By Alex Brown

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Published on May 14, 2025

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Revenge is the theme du jour for my ten favorite science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories I read last month. Most (but not all) of the stories in this spotlight are about what you’ll do to get revenge, what you do when you get it, and what comes after the dust has settled. A little god murder here, some necromancy there, and some brain swapping for good measure.

“Bite by Bite and Lie by Lie” by Malda Marlys

This story feels much bigger than its very short length. A woman lives “in a land replete with small gods and smaller miracles.” After earning the favor of a god of war, she and her descendants eat him alive. Because war never ends, they must keep consuming him, which alters both them and him. A joyfully violent tale. No matter how powerful someone may seem, they can always be taken down. (Small Wonders—April 2025; issue 22)

“Highway 1, Past Hope” by Maria Haskins

Did someone say revenge? “Layla rises like a breath in winter from the hollow beneath the black cottonwoods beside the river, shrugging off the blanket of dirt and leaves and centipedes she slept beneath.” After her murder, Layla puts herself together and goes hunting. At the same time Penni, a woman with an abusive partner, gets stranded on the side of the road. Their lives (deaths?) intersect in blood and bones. I loved the structure of it, with long paragraphs broken up by short sentences. It keeps the reader disoriented, like taking a deep breath and holding it, then gasping in surprise. (The Deadlands—Spring 2025; issue 38)

“Luscious Lake” by Erin Brown

Written like a marketing brochure or instruction guide, Erin Brown takes readers to Lucious Lake. The lake is in the middle of a jungle, surrounded by dangerous, poisonous creatures. As treacherous as the journey to the lake is, what you must do to yourself when you get there is even harder. Brown writes prose lush with description and sharp in its subtext. How much of yourself are you willing to destroy to get what you want? (Baffling Magazine—April 2025; issue 19)

“Mandrake Experiment” by Toshiya Kamei

With the future of humanity looking bleak, Yuri and Patience decided to reinvent the species. Our chances of survival as the environment continues to collapse thins with each insect that dies. Ayame may be our way out. She is “the first Mandrake in history,” a sort of human-plant hybrid. This story is bittersweet, one full of sadness tinged with hope. A beautiful story about sacrifice, love, and what a parent will do to give their child the best possible future. (The Skull & Laurel—April 2025; issue 3)

“Moonrise” by Bethany C. Morrow 

Liz and Everly have been best friends for ages. For years they were resigned to communicating via messages, mostly meme, gifs, and jokes. One ongoing joke they ran with was how one day all Black women were going to take off to the moon and leave the Earth to its troubles. When Liz and Everly finally get to spend some time together IRL, their in-joke finally comes true…in a fashion. We demand so much from Black women. Every election, every social crisis, every everything, it’s Black women who must steer the ship even as they are derided for not doing more. Bethany C. Morrow gives them some damn peace for once. (FIYAH Literary Magazine—Spring 2025; issue 34)

“No One Dies of Longing” by Anjali Sachdeva

“A garden is a joy, but also a labor.” Our narrator is a servant gardener for a wealthy, powerful man, Mr. Qadir. In the hands of our narrator, the garden thrives, not least of which is because she’s a witch. Not that he knows that, of course. Mr. Qadir keeps his servants trapped by withholding their passports, but that doesn’t bother the witch. She has plans for him. I love a good revenge story, especially ones involving bad men and the women who force them to face the consequences of their actions. (Strange Horizons—April 7, 2025)

“Order Update” by Olajesutofunmi Akinyemi

Olajesutofunmi Akinyemi constructs this as a series of emails between an associate at the organization Wives Against Oringa and Adebayo, a terrible husband who deserves everything he’s about to get. The company claims good wives are being infected by Oringas, “red-haired humanoids with eyes at the bottom of their square heads and a mouth at the top.” They send Adebayo a kit to help him destroy the Oringas and turn his wife back into a docile, submissive woman. Things don’t work out the way he expects. This was a fun surprise! The ending had me cackling. (Omenana Magazine—March 31, 2025; issue 31)

“The Unfactory” by Derrick Boden

Our unnamed narrator’s job is unmaking people, places, animals, things, anything and everything. Their boss offers them a project, and they go about unmaking it. First, a pizzeria, gone and with it the good life the woman who owned it had. At first the jobs seem random and inexplicable. Then our narrator discovers a pattern. They are very good at their job in the “unfactory,” which comes in handy toward the end. A sinister story with an inventive premise. (Diabolical Plots—April 2, 2025; issue 122A)

“Whatever Remains of the Dead” by Lyndsey Silveira

The revenge our narrator exacts happens before the story begins. A classmate brings a gun to school and kills several people. In her rage, her gift of necromancy erupts. She stops him from killing anyone else, and now she has to live with the repercussions of that. She may have gotten her revenge, but people are still dead. Lyndsey Silveira asks us what comes after revenge? What do you build in its wake? (Cast of Wonders—April 12, 2025; issue 636)

“The Witch-Doctor’s Revenge” by Nuzo Onoh

Let’s end this with a little revenge on colonizers (I may or may not be listening to the Sinners soundtrack as I type this). Mr. Bassey is a teacher for the Catholic Church. He’s sent by Father O’Brien to open a new primary school, mostly because he’s African and speaks Igbo and so serves as a bridge between the villagers and the colonizers. He’s bought into the white man’s promises of privilege and is eager to bring “civilization” to the “urchins.” A dead witch-doctor isn’t having it. Nuzo Onoh is known as the Queen of African Horror, and this story makes it clear why. It’s gory, chilling, and an act of defiance, all rolled into one. (Nightmare Magazine—April 2025; issue 151)

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The post Must Read Short Speculative Fiction: April 2025 appeared first on Reactor.

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In my last post, ‘The Half Life of Empire’, I charted the rise and fall of the British and US empires, as measured by their share of world energy use. Afterwards, several readers requested that I apply the same methods to the rise and fall of the Soviet Union.

Here’s my attempt to do so.

Figure 1 shows my estimates for the rise and fall of the Soviet empire, as measured by its share of world energy use. The Soviet ‘half life’ — the period spent to and from the halfway mark of peak dominance — lasted for sixty six years, from 1926 to 1992.

Some backstory. The Soviet Union formed out of the ashes of the Russian Empire, which itself dates back to the early 18th century. Unlike the British Empire, which industrialized during the 19th century, the Russian Empire remained largely agrarian. (It was one of the last places to allow serfdom.) Hence, Russia saw little material growth during the 1800s.

That would change with the Russian Revolution, which began in 1917. After a half decade of internal turmoil mixed with imperial conquest, the Red Army proclaimed victory and created the Soviet Union in 1922. Afterwards, the Soviet regime embarked on a period of intense industrialization, organized around a series of five-year plans. As a result, Soviet energy use exploded.

By the 1960s, the Soviet Union reached its peak level of dominance, consuming slightly more than 15% of the world’s energy. Then, after coasting for several decades, the late 1980s saw the Soviet government embroiled in a series of crises which would ultimately proved insurmountable. By 1992, the Soviet regime had collapsed, and the remaining Russian state fell into a deep depression. Today, Russia’s share of world energy use is less than a third of the Soviet peak.

The Soviet experience: burning bright and collapsing fast

Returning to wider imperial history, one of the intriguing features of the British and US empires is that despite their apparent differences, they’ve had a curiously similar rhythm. Both empires rose and fell over the course of two centuries. And both empires had a half-life of about one hundred years. Figure 2 shows the similarities.

Is this shared timeline a universal feature of imperial history — a sign that all empires have a fixed destiny? Turning to the Soviet example, the answer seems to be no. Figure 3 makes the case.

Compared to Britain and the United States, the Soviet Union rose and fell more abruptly. And that makes sense; both the beginning and the end of the Soviet empire were punctuated by revolution. The Soviet Union was created when the Bolsheviks overthrew the Tsarist regime and instituted state communism. And the communist regime died when the Soviet government collapsed and was replaced by capitalist oligarchy.

In contrast, the British and US empires rose and fell with far less internal conflict. And so their histories of dominance and decline are smoother … at least so far.

Looking to the future, it seems unlikely that American politicians will manage to reverse the US descent into imperial irrelevance. But what could happen is that US politics devolve into revolution and/or civil war, similar to when the Soviet Union collapsed.¹ If that happens, expect a punctuated decline of American power.

The Cold War in hindsight

While we’ve got the Soviet energy data in hand, let’s revisit some Cold War history. According to standard lore, the Cold War consisted of a protracted struggle between two superpowers — one capitalist and one communist. In the end (the story goes), the United States won the battle because of the superiority of capitalism.

Turning to the energy data, the empirical story is rather different. As Figure 4 shows, the US exited World War II as the world’s sole superpower. In 1945, it consumed about 37% of the world’s energy. In that year, the Soviet share of world energy use sat at just under 11% — less than a third the US value.

In this context, it seems inappropriate to call the Soviet Union a ‘superpower’. It was a rival empire, yes. But at the dawn of the Cold War, there was no real competition. The US utterly dominated the global picture.

Over the next forty years, however, things changed. From the 1950s onward, US dominance gradually waned, while the Soviet Union managed to maintain its share of the world energy pie. The result was a gradual convergence between the two powers. Indeed, this convergence is the real story of the Cold War, as Figure 5 shows. From the dawn of the conflict in 1947 to the end in 1991, Soviet energy consumption consistently increased relative to the United States.

Of course, when the Soviet regime collapsed in 1991, the energy convergence ended. But should we read this collapse as a testament to the innate superiority of capitalism over communism?

In some ways the answer is yes, simply because things that die prematurely can hardly be called ‘superior’. And yet, while it existed, the Soviet regime was remarkable effective at closing the energy gap with the United States. The reasons are not mysterious.

To a large extent, industrialization is a project of infrastructure build out. To industrialize, you lay railways, you pave highways, you erect cities, and you construct massive factories. And the truth is that these huge projects are always done by large hierarchically controlled organizations. So the question is not whether industrialization should involve ‘central planning’. The question is whether the ‘central planning’ should be state dominated or corporate dominated. The US (and Britain before it) opted for the corporate-dominated approach. The Soviet Union opted for the state-dominated approach.

Since it ultimately collapsed, we know that the Soviet state-dominated approach had a problem with staying power. In this regard, the corporate-dominated approach to industrialization has an advantage, in that individual firms are (usually) small enough that they can fail without breaking the whole system. That said, while it survived, the state-dominated approach to industrialization was remarkably successful. (Figure 6 shows some of the big Soviet infrastructure projects.)

Looking at this industrial history, the economist Branko Milanović argues that actually-existing ‘communism’ proved to be starkly different than the utopia envisioned by Karl Marx. While Marx saw communism as the final stage of social evolution, real-world communism seems to have been an alternative, state-dominated path to industrialization — a path that either collapsed into corporate capitalism (as in Russia), or evolved into corporate capitalism more gracefully (as in China). Either way, the road to industrialization ended with corporate oligarchy.

Of course, given the unfolding ecological calamity, it seems doubtful that the oligarchic system has a long-term future. But that’s a topic for another time.

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Accumulating territory vs. building industry

The rise and fall of the Soviet Union had two components:

1. the expansion/collapse of industrial capacity
2. the appropriation/loss of territory

The latter component was most important at the beginning and end of the Soviet regime. Figure 7 illustrates. During the Russian Revolution, the Red Army conquered huge swaths of Asia, considerably expanding the territory covered by the former Russian Empire. And when the Soviet regime collapsed in 1991, many Soviet-block states gained independence.

The results of this territory gain/loss are visible in Figure 7 as the difference between the red curve (which tracks the share of world energy used by all Soviet block countries both before, during and after the Soviet Union existed) and the blue curve, (which tracks the energy use of the actual Soviet empire as it gained and lost territory).

Sources and methods

Soviet energy consumption

I estimate Soviet energy consumption by summing the energy used by Russia, plus the energy used by the various Soviet block states during the years they were part of the Soviet regime.

Reliable energy data for these countries — from the Energy Institute Statistical Review of World Energy — goes back to 1985.

Prior to that, I estimate Soviet energy use from its carbon emissions. (Data is from Our World in Data Annual CO2 emissions.) The idea is that carbon emissions track the level of fossil fuel use, which is by far the most important source of industrial energy.

To account for non-fossil fuel energy use (which is most important prior to industrialization), I assume that Soviet citizens consumed about 26,000 KCal per person per day from biomass energy (mostly burning wood). (This number is Ian Morris’ estimate for per capita daily energy use in Western Europe, circa the year 1400.)

To convert carbon emissions into energy use, I index the carbon data twice. First, I index the carbon data to Soviet energy use in 1985. The resulting series assumes that Soviet energy use prior to 1985 directly tracks its carbon emissions.

The problem with this estimate is that it ignores non-fossil fuel sources of energy, which become more important as we head back in time. To correct this problem, I then add to the time series the constant value of 26,000 KCal of energy per person per day. (Population data comes from Our World in Data.) Finally, I re-index this updated energy estimate to the statistical data from 1985.

British and US energy consumption

For sources, see the appendix in ‘The Half Life of Empire’.

World energy consumption

Data for world energy consumption is from the following sources:

• 1800 to present: Our World in Data, Energy Production and Consumption
• Prior to 1800: data is from Ian Morris’ book The Measure of Civilization, Table 3.1 & 3.4. Morris reports data for energy use per capita in the East and West. Using population data from Angus Maddison, I use Morris’ data to estimate world energy use. I then splice this data to the OWD data in 1800.

Notes

Further reading

Fix, B. (2021). Economic development and the death of the free market. Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review, 1–46.

Milanovic, B. (2019). Capitalism, alone: The future of the system that rules the world. Harvard University Press.

Schlögel, K. (2021). The Soviet century: Archaeology of a lost world. Princeton University Press.

The post The Soviet Experiment with Empire appeared first on Economics from the Top Down.

Today's links

• Who Broke the Internet? Part II: Mr Lehman Goes to Geneva.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

Who Broke the Internet? Part II (permalink)

"Understood: Who Broke the Internet?" is my new podcast for CBC about the enshittogenic policy decisions that gave rise to enshittification. Episode two just dropped: "ctrl-ctrl-ctrl":

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor/episode/16145640-ctrl-ctrl-ctrl

The thesis of the show is straightforward: the internet wasn't killed by ideological failings like "greed," nor by economic concepts like "network effects," nor by some cyclic force of history that drives towards "re-intermediation." Rather, all of these things were able to conquer the open, wild, creative internet because of policies that meant that companies that yielded to greed were able to harness network effects in order to re-intermediate the internet.

My enshittification work starts with the symptoms of enshittification, the procession of pathological changes we can observe as platform users and sellers. Stage one: platforms are good to their end users while locking them in. Stage two: platforms worsen things for those captive users in order to tempt in business customers – who they also lock in. Stage three: platforms squeeze those locked-in business customers (publishers, advertisers, performers, workers, drivers, etc), and leave behind only the smallest atoms of value that are needed to keep users and customers stuck to the system. All the value except for this mingy residue is funneled to shareholders and executives, and the system becomes a pile of shit.

This pattern is immediately recognizable as the one we've all experienced and continue to experience, from eBay taking away your right to sue when you're ripped off:

https://www.valueaddedresource.net/ebay-user-agreement-may-2025-arbitration/

Or Duolingo replacing human language instructors with AI, even though by definition language learners are not capable of identifying and correcting errors in AI-generated language instruction (if you knew more about a language than the AI, you wouldn't need Duolingo):

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-ai-jobs-crisis-is-here-now

I could cite examples all day long, from companies as central as Amazon:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

To smarthome niche products like Sonos:

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/sonos-ceo-patrick-spence-steps-down-after-app-update-debacle-2025-01-13/

To professional tools like Photoshop:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

To medical implants like artificial eyes:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/12/unsafe-at-any-speed/#this-is-literally-your-brain-on-capitalism

To the entire nursing profession:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

To the cars on our streets:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

And the gig workers who drive them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

There is clearly an epidemic – a pandemic – of enshittification, and cataloging the symptoms is important to tracking the spread of the disease. But if we're going to do something to stem the tide, we need to identify the contagion. What caused enshittification to take root, what allows it to spread, and who was patient zero?

That's where "Understood: Who Broke the Internet?" comes in:

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor

At root, "enshittification" is a story about constraints – not the bad things that platforms are doing now, but rather, the forces that stopped them from doing those things before. There are four of those constraints:

I. Competition: When we stopped enforcing antitrust law, we let companies buy their competitors ("It is better to buy than to compete" -M. Zuckerberg). That insulated companies from market-based punishments for enshittification, because a handful of large companies can enshittify in lockstep, matching each other antifeature for antifeature. You can't shop your way out of a monopoly.

II. Regulation: The collapse of tech into "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four" (-T. Eastman) allowed the Big Tech cartel to collude to capture its regulators. Tech companies don't have to worry about governments stepping in to punish them for enshittificatory tactics, because the government is on Big Tech's side.

III. Labor: When tech workers were scarce and companies competed fiercely for their labor, they were able to resist demands to enshittify the products they created and cared about. But "I fight for the user," only works if you have power over your boss, and scarcity-derived power is brittle, crumbling as soon as labor supply catches up with demand (this is why tech bosses are so excited to repeat the story that AI can replace programmers – whether or not it's true, it is an effective way to gut scarcity-driven tech worker power). Without unions, tech worker power vanished.

IV. Interoperability: The same digital flexibility that lets tech companies pull the enshittifying bait-and-switch whereby prices, recommendations, and costs are constantly changing cuts both ways. Digital toolsmiths have always thwarted enshittification with ad- and tracker-blockers, alternative clients, scrapers, etc. In a world of infinitely flexible computers, every 10' high pile of shit summons a hacker with an 11' ladder.

This week's episode of "Who Broke the Internet?" focuses on those IP laws, specifically, the legislative history of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a 1998 law whose Section 1201 bans any kind of disenshittifying mods and hacks.

We open the episode with Dmitry Skylarov being arrested at Def Con in 2001, after he gave a presentation explaining how he defeated the DRM on Adobe ebooks, so that ebook owners could move their books between devices and open them with different readers. Skylarov was a young father of two, a computer scientist, who found himself in the FBI's clutches, facing a lengthy prison sentence for telling an American audience that Adobe's product was defective, and explaining how to exploit its defects to let them read their own books.

Skylarov was the first person charged with a felony under DMCA 1201, and while the fact of his arrest shocked technically minded people at the time, it was hardly a surprise to anyone familiar with DMCA 1201. This was a law acting exactly as intended.

DMCA 1201 has its origins in the mid-1990s, when Al Gore was put in charge of the National Information Infrastructure program to demilitarize the internet and open it for civilian use (AKA the "Information Superhighway"). Gore came into conflict with Bruce Lehman, Bill Clinton's IP Czar, who proposed a long list of far-ranging, highly restrictive rules for the new internet, including an "anticircumvention" rule that would ban tampering with digital locks.

This was a pretty obscure and technical debate, but some people immediately grasped its significance. Pam Samuelson, the eminent Berkeley copyright scholar, raised the alarm, rallying a diverse coalition against Lehman's proposal. They won – Gore rejected Lehman's ideas and sent him packing. But Lehman didn't give up easily – he flew straight to Geneva, where he arm-twisted the UN's World Property Organization into passing two "internet treaties" that were virtually identical to the proposals that Gore had rejected. Then, Lehman went back to the USA and insisted that Congress had to overrule Gore and live up to its international obligations by adopting his law. As Lehman said – on some archival tape we were lucky to recover – he did "an end-run around Congress."

Lehman had been warned, in eye-watering detail, about the way that his rule protecting digital locks would turn into a system of private laws. Once a device was computerized, all a manufacturer needed to do was wrap it in a digital lock, and in that instant, it would become a literal felony of use that digital device in ways the manufacturer didn't like. It didn't matter if you were legally entitled to do something, like taking your car to an independent mechanic, refilling your ink cartridge, blocking tracking on Instagram, or reading your Kindle books on a Kobo device. The fact that tampering with digital locks was a crime, combined with the fact that you had to get around a digital lock to do these things, made these things illegal.

Lehman knew that this would happen. The fact that his law led – in just a few short years – to a computer scientist being locked up by the FBI for disclosing defects in a widely used consumer product, was absolutely foreseeable at the time Lehman was doing his Geneva two-step and "doing an end-run around Congress."

The point is that there were always greedy bosses, and since the turn of the century, they'd had the ability to use digital tools to enshittify their services. What changed wasn't the greed – it was the law. When Bruce Lehman disarmed every computer user, he rendered us helpless against the predatory instincts of anyone with a digital product or service, at a moment when everything was being digitized.

This week's episode recovers some of the lost history, an act I find very liberating. It's easy to feel like you're a prisoner of destiny, whose life is being shaped by vast, impersonal forces. But the enshittificatory torments of the modern digital age are the result of specific choices, made by named people, in living memory. Knowing who did this to us, and what they did, is the first step to undoing it.

In next week's episode, we'll tell you about the economic theories that created the "five giant websites filled with screenshots of the other four." We'll tell you who foisted those policies on us, and show you the bright line from them to the dominance of companies like Amazon. And we'll set up the conclusion, where we'll tell you how we'll wipe out the legacies of these monsters of history and kill the enshitternet.

Get "Understood: Who Broke the Internet?" in whatever enshittified app you get your podcasts on (or on Antennapod, which is pretty great). Here's the RSS:

https://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/nakedemperor.xml

Hey look at this (permalink)

• The Gig Trap https://www.hrw.org/report/2025/05/12/gig-trap/algorithmic-wage-and-labor-exploitation-platform-work-us (h/t Dan Gillmor)

• The FCC Must Reject Efforts to Lock Up Public Airwaves https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/fcc-must-reject-broadcast-drm

• A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2a4qxg2l (h/t Fediverse Report)

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Everything Bad is Good for You: How TV and games make us smarter https://memex.craphound.com/2005/05/13/everything-bad-is-good-for-you-how-tv-and-games-make-us-smarter/

#20yrsago Broadcast Flag back from the dead https://memex.craphound.com/2005/05/13/broadcast-flag-back-from-the-dead/

#15yrsago Words that are excluded from “secret questions” https://simonwillison.net/2010/May/14/sacramento/

#15yrsago Barbie-themed hotel rooms for three year olds that cost €1,600/night https://web.archive.org/web/20100513074929/http://www.hotelchatter.com/story/2010/5/10/21912/7175/hotels/What_Would_Carrie_Say_The_Plaza_Athenee_Is_Getting_Barbiefied

#10yrsago John Deere: of course you “own” your tractor, but only if you agree to let us rip you off https://memex.craphound.com/2015/05/13/john-deere-of-course-you-own-your-tractor-but-only-if-you-agree-to-let-us-rip-you-off/

#5yrsago Senate Dems want to ban internet disconnection https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/13/malwaretech/#sanders-wyden-merkley

#5yrsago NSO Group tried to sell malware to US law enforcement https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/13/malwaretech/#nso-group

#5yrsago Restaurants, hotels and bars cut the cord https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/13/malwaretech/#cordcutting

#5yrsago Feds want national snitchlines for bosses whose workers don't want to die https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/13/malwaretech/#snitchlines

#5yrsago Corporate Dems want to bail out lobbyists and dark money orgs https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/13/malwaretech/#thanks-nancy

#5yrsago Red states prep for postal vote https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/13/malwaretech/#postal-vote

#5yrsago How Marcus Hutchins saved the world and lived to tell the tale https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/13/malwaretech/#malwaretech

#5yrsago Gadget that adds steps to your Fitbit https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/13/malwaretech/#restepper

#5yrsago University requires students to buy nonexistent webcams https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/13/malwaretech/#unobtanium

#1yrago AI "art" and uncanniness https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15
  https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515

• Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16
  https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/

• Virtual: Writing to Resist (California Writers Club Berkeley), May 18:
  https://cwc-berkeley.org/writing-to-resist-5-18-25/

• Seattle: Cascade PBS Ideas Festival, May 30
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cascade-pbs-ideas-festival-tickets-1251699710529

• PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22
  https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025

• PDX: Picks and Shovels with bunnie Huang at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20
  https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0

• London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1
  https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/

• Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059

• Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 3
  https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Remember when the internet was… good? What happened? (The Current)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-63-the-current/clip/16145000-remember-internet-was…-good-what-happened

• Don't Be Evil (Who Killed the Internet?)
  https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/audio/9.6746333

• How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It (Cloudfest)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ai-fC-2Bpo

Latest books (permalink)

• • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
• The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

Upcoming books (permalink)

• Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

• Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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ISSN: 3066-764X

You may have heard of Christian Bök. You may have read about him on this very blog if you’ve been hanging out here long enough. Perhaps you were even one of the very select few to witness the seminal talk I gave back in 2016^[1]—“ScArt: or, How to Tell When You’ve Finished Fucking”— which climaxed with a glowing description of Bök’s magnum opus, then still in progress. And if you read Echopraxia, you’ll have encountered—without even knowing it— a brief cameo of that work near the end, suggesting that at least in the Blindopraxia timeline, he’d brought his baby to fruition.

Truth to tell, I didn’t know if he was actually going to pull it off for the longest time. I thought he’d given up years ago.

The story so far: back in the early two-thousands Christian Bök, famous for accomplishments lesser poets would never even dream of attempting (he once wrote a book in which each chapter contained only a single vowel) started work on the world’s first biologically-self-replicating poem: the Xenotext Experiment, which aspired to encode a poem into the genetic code of a bacterium. Not just a poem, either: a dialog. The DNA encoding one half of that exchange (“Orpheus” by name) was designed to function both as text and as a functional gene. The protein it coded for functioned as the other half (“Eurydice”), a sort of call-and-response between the gene and its product. The protein was also designed to fluoresce red, which might seem a tad gratuitous until you realize that “Eurydice”’s half of the dialog contains the phrase “the faery is rosy/of glow”.

Phase One involved engineering Orpheus and Eurydice into the benign and ubiquitous E. coli, just to work out the bugs. Ultimately, though, the target microbe was Deinococcus radiodurans: also known as “Conan the Bacterium” on account of being one of the toughest microbial motherfuckers on the planet. To quote Bök himself:

Astronauts fear it. Biologists fear it. It is not human. It lives in isolation. It grows in complete darkness. It derives no energy from the Sun. It feeds on asbestos. It feeds on concrete. It inhabits a gold seam on level 104 of the Mponeng Mine in Johannesburg. It lives in alkaline lakelets full of arsenic. It grows in lagoons of boiling asphalt. It thrives in a deadly miasma of hydrogen sulphide. It breathes iron. It breathes rust. It needs no oxygen to live. It can survive for a decade without water. It can withstand temperatures of 323 k, hot enough to melt rubidium. It can sleep for 100 millennia inside a crystal of salt, buried in Death Valley. It does not die in the hellish infernos at the Städtbibliothek during the firebombing of Dresden. It does not burn when exposed to ultraviolet rays. It does not reproduce via the use of dna. It breeds, unseen, inside canisters of hairspray. It feeds on polyethylene. It feeds on hydrocarbons. It inhabits caustic geysers of steam near the Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park.

I’d love to quote all seven glorious and terrifying pages, but to keep within the bounds of Fair Use I’ll skip ahead to the end:

It is totally inhuman. It does not love you. It does not need you. It does not even know that you exist. It is invincible. It is unkillable. It has lived through five mass extinctions. It is the only known organism to have ever lived on the Moon. It awaits your experiments.

As things turned out, it had to await somewhat longer than expected. The project hinged upon molecular techniques that did not exist when the experiment began. Christian taught himself the relevant skills— genetics, proteomics, coding— and enlisted a team of scientists (not to mention a supercomputer or two) to invent them. His audacity was more than merely inspiring; some might even call it infuriating. As I railed back in 2016:

It was fine when Art came to science in search of inspiration; that’s as it should be. I suppose it was okay— if a little iffy— when Science started going back to Art for solutions to scientific and technical problems. But this crosses a line: with The Xenotext, we have reached the point where Science is being used solely to assist in the creation of new art. Scientists are developing new techniques just to help Christian finish his bloody poem.

Up to now, we’ve generally been in the driver’s seat. Insofar as a relationship even existed, Science was the top, Art the Bottom. But Art has now started driving Science. Science has discovered its inner sub.

As a former scientist myself, I was not quite sure how to feel about that. But however that was, I knew Christian Bök was to blame.

Fortunately, Science got a reprieve. The project hit a bump at E. coli. Eurydice fluoresced but the accompanying words got mangled. When they eventually cleared that hurdle and moved to Phase Two, Deinococcus fought back, shredding the code before it ever had a chance to express. Conan, apparently, does not like people trying to play with its insides. It’s already got its genes set up just the way it likes them. Unkillable.

That, as far as I knew, was where the story ended ten years ago. Christian released The Xenotext: Book One in 2015, documenting his efforts and gift-wrapping them in some gorgeous and evocative bonus content, but the prize remained out of reach. He headed off to Australia to follow other pursuits; then to that oversurveilled and repressive shithole known as the United Kingdom. We fell out of touch. I assumed he’d given up on the whole project.

Oh me of little faith.

Because now it’s 2025, and he fucking did it. The Xenotext is live and glowing in Deinococcus radiodurans: iterating away inside that immortal microbial bad-ass that feeds on stainless steel, that resides inside the core of reactor no. 4 at Chernobyl, that does not die in the explosion that disintegrates the Space Shuttle Columbia during orbital reentry. Christian Bök did not give up. Christian Bök did not fail. Christian Bök is going to outlive civilization, outlive most of the biosphere itself.

The rest of us might think we achieve artistic immortality if our work lasts a century or three. Bök blows his nose at such puny ambitions. His work might get deciphered by Fermi aliens who finally make it to our neighborhood a billion years from now. It could be iterating right up until the sun swallows this planet whole.

It’ll almost certainly be around for Dan Brüks to find iterating in the Oregon desert, mere decades down the road.

The Xenotext: Book Two comes out from Coach House in June 2025. It would be well worth the price just for the the acrobatics and anagrams and sonnets, for the way it remixes science and fiction and the classic canon of dead white Europeans^[2]. It contains poetry to entrance people who hate poetry. It juggles space exploration and the Fermi Paradox and the potentially extraterrestrial origins of Bacteriophage φx174. But its rosy flickering heart is that dialog iterating away in Conan even as I type. A reinvention, almost a quarter-century in the making. A fucking monument if you ask me, equal parts revelation and revolution.

If you happen to live in or around Toronto, it’s getting an official launch on May 27 at The Society Clubhouse, 967 College St, from 7-9pm. It’s one of a half-dozen Coach House titles that will be launched that night, and no doubt all six authors are worthy in their own right. Still. You know who I’m going for.

Maybe I’ll see some of you there.

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →