Bookstore Creep: Love After the End from Belmont Books
Full of biopunks who feel the earth ache in their bones, who envision a future of synthetic biology, who document the future extinction of a lineage of storytellers, and describe hard-ons from an AI rat; first on the docket for review is Love After The End. This anthology of short stories found its way into my hands thanks to Joe, the owner of Belmont Books over in Southeast Portland. His dense two-room shop mixes new and used books helter skelter, giving large swaths of shelf to subjects like philosophy, poetry, anarchism, and local literary magazines. When I asked Joe to recommend me a modern book or two written by authors that speak to the underground culture, or the counterculture of this country; he immediately started weaving through the shop. He pulled book after book from their homes and placed them into my open hands before he had even finished telling me that he didn’t really know what to recommend. He warned me to stop him at some point, or else he would recommend every book in the shop in reverse order. The books piling up all seemed to cover dystopia, horror, or the grotesque. When asked if there was anything that he would recommend that was more rooted in the real world, perhaps autobiographical to an extent, he laughed and replied with certainty that “nobody does anything even remotely interesting in real life anymore.” I mentally noted that the challenge has been accepted, and sat down on the floor of the bookstore to parse through my pile. I flipped through pages, read back covers in a whisper, and intermittently listened in on the breezy chatter that wove its way in and out of the establishment. I, Rosalie L.H. Caggiano, beginning the next project in my endless series of seemingly obscure but very important writer’s missions, was having fun. Eventually, I selected Love After The End.
This is an anthology of two-spirit and indigiqueer speculative fiction, edited by Joshua Whitehead, and winner of a Lambda Literary Award. The anthology re-envisions the cannon of dystopian and apocalypse literature by asking the big question right on the first page: “Who names an event apocalyptic and whom must an apocalypse affect in order for it to be thought of as ‘cannon’?” A complex question that gets us immediately thinking of the history of dystopian writing and wondering more about the authors. The question got me wondering who the hell writes all of the literature that we consider classics, and if we could ever consider them representative of an era of thought. What voices were excluded for the sake of homogeneity? Is that demographic changing, where is literature heading, and where could it head?
These storytellers are “the wildest kinds of biopunks”. They are writers of love stories and stories of hope set in a dystopian future. They are writers indigenous to the lands that we now call Canada and the USA, but used to call Turtle Island, and they are queer and two-spirit writers. They choose to identify as two-spirit, another gender believed to be common among most, if not all, indigenous communities on Turtle Island. This way of identifying, two-spirit, was created in the 1990s to familiarize English speakers with an enduring and common concept in Native American cultures, and is an intentional reduction of the varied words and roles that different tribes use. The writers also identify using the new wording of indigenous + queer = indigiqueer.
Beyond the content of the stories, the collection in itself is radical. The variety of acclaimed and obscure authors. Here we read work from those with MFAs in writing, PHDs in Oceanography, zine-makers, somatic practitioners, and spoken word artists.
How many amazing stories have not made it into print because they are not up to some standards that everyone in the publishing industry is too stubborn to look past? How many intricate tales have not made it to print because the communities that want to share them don’t have the energy to edit them to an academic standard? To integrate enough literary tricks and virtue-signals to slap editors in the face as ‘wow, great writing’? To change stories so that they are more guaranteed to sell? It is also radical that there is some sentence structure within the collection that would never make it past a traditional editor. Not only that, but that there are words integrated from many different languages, that one has an extensive author’s note at the end, and that some read as youth fiction while others read as very adult. This is radical because emerging writers, underground, and counterculture writers can tear down the publishing industry standards if they get together and put out work that speaks to the people of our cities, towns, and villages. Writing is not just for other writers, it is for everyone.
Diving into the content of the stories, the characters are aware of death, destruction, and total collapse. They don’t spend the whole story wrapped up in that tragedy, though. As it says in the introduction, “we’ve hardened into bedrock-- see how our bodies dazzle in the light?” They look beyond the impending total oblivion to find love and hope. Joshua Whitehead explains that this is an intentional theme and possible because “we have already survived the apocalypse-- this, right here, right now, is a dystopian present. What better way to imagine survivability than to think about how we may flourish into being joyously animated rather than merely alive?”
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We begin our journey on Io, the moon of Jupiter, with Abacus by Nathan Adler. Dayan, which means ‘my home’ in Ojibwe, has a forbidden romance with an organic AI in a rat’s body. His mother encourages him to play with his human friends in VR, instead of spending his time with AI in real life. His grandmother’s avatar catches the two fooling around and is shocked. Dayan pushes back against his family and runs away with the rat to a colony of escaped AIs hiding in a basalt crater. In an interesting reversal of the usual afrofuturism themes that this anthology pays respect to, we find Abacus the AI rat estranged from Mother Earth, longing to get back to her. In almost every way, this story turns tradition on its head. We find this rebellious freedom song coming from a rat, who helps to free Dayan from the doldrums of VR and his high-tech elders, and back into a real adventure, maybe someday back home.
The anthology continues at a high pace in History of the New World by Adam Garnet Jones as a family moves toward a one-way portal to ‘The New World’. The two mothers of a seven-year-old child embody archetypes of two clashing viewpoints on humanity. There is Thorah, the “blue-eyed Liberal atheist” who “believed in the creation of and adherence to complex systems”. Then there is the narrator, a “brown-eyed Two-Spirit nehiyou with a homemade haircut and a marrow-deep longing for the old things that rumbled under the surface of the world” and was “hungry for chaos”. The narrator’s world is rocked when she hears news that there is indeed some life capable of speech in The New World, and they have sent a message: “Your circle is not round”. The reader realizes that colonizing outer-space is exactly as it sounds: colonizing. Furthermore, we wonder what psychological harm we might inflict upon ourselves if we do not attempt to close our circle here, where our bones were built.
In The Ark of the Turtle’s Back by jaye simpson there is an alternative take on the colonization of outer-space when the new narrator is unwittingly pulled along in a journey to another planet. This narrator asks directly “Who did we colonize, Dakib. Who did we kill for this?”. The answer is Earth itself, a disintegrating planet. In a visceral and painful moment, the narrator folds to her deepest desires and undergoes an ovary-implant so that she can finally bear children, at the same moment that their launching spaceship destroys the Earth. When she wakes she screams for days, her throat bleeding, in mourning for Nimama, or Earth. It is a moral discomfort that is not resolved. Her community chose to transplant the womb of the Earth into her womb, as everything is falling apart-- and is that right?
Seven stories in, the series takes a dark turn with Seed Children by Mari Kurisato. The sun has collapsed, humans that cannot escape ‘Withering Earth’ are turning to cannibalism, and the narrator is spitting blood while telling her story. In a twist, we find out that the protagonist is a synthetic human with the recreated mind of an Anishinaabe scientist, attempting to save a school of synthbabies. Again, similar to the Abacus story, these synth-bodied folks are more moral and brave than the humans, who have lost their way. The synthfolk find their way to a potential utopia by taking a Great Tree, a natural escape pod of Anishinaabe lore, out to refuge. There is an optimistic view of technology in both this story and Abacus. Technological optimism paired with the indigenous and queer lenses makes the reader wonder about the balance of tradition versus progress in technology and systems of thought, as well as what tradition will mean in the coming centuries.
The anthology comes to a close with the love-centric story of Eloise by David A. Robertson. In a world where people go to coffee shops to tune into their ‘Gate Portals’, the narrator searches for her lost lover. This is a realistic future that seems closer than all the others, where most world-building details are similar to the modern day, except that people can spend years in a separate virtual life while just minutes pass in real life using ‘The Gate’. The narrator realizes that her love had used The Gate in order to forget her, and she wonders why her love would choose to numb herself out with technology rather than open her heart. The narrator leaps to her rescue. The anthology ends with this reminder to listen for our hearts, and not to numb out. A sweet end for a collection of stories of love in the apocalypse, especially when we remember the introduction, which states that dystopia has already arrived for these writers.
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Without the reminders that come from reading Love After The End for this first installment of Bookstore Creep, I might not have realized that this investigation is not about literature in the United States. To restrict the search to the bounds of artificial borders is idiotic and not something that I believe in, anyways. Such a mission as mine requires extensive charts, figures, flow charts, and maps. Luckily, I was able to draw a properly expansive map the first time around. Without the reminders that come from this work, I might not have thought deeply about the value of anthologies in counterculture or underground writing. Anthologies may commonly be considered as a dirty trick for publishing houses and authors to make a quick dollar, enticing the readers of many different authors to purchase one paperback. However, it is possible that the idea of collective promotion changes context when talking about niche literature, underrepresented voices in literature, and underground literature. I may even go so far as to say that to collect a group of authors’ work together and publish it as one is where it’s at!
The collection is assembled and edited by Joshua Whitehead, an Oji-Cree, Two Spirit/Indigiqueer member of Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1). He has books published with Talonbooks and Arsenal Pulp Press, and has won many awards. He is working on a PhD in Indigenous Literatures and Cultures at University of Calgary.
Bookstore Creep contains recommendations from the continuous investigation of Rosalie L.H. Caggiano into modern-day authors who are writing about the counterculture and the underground in the USO (The United States Of...). The USO is a zone that may encompass the whole of what is known as North America, or might not quite make it to the Southernmost and Northernmost hinterlands of what is known as Mexico or Canada. Rosalie searches for modern writers that upend the impression that “nobody does anything even remotely interesting in real life anymore”. She talks straight to the book-tenders of the City of Portland, exploring bookshop by bookshop instead of wallowing in the depths of the 129+ million books on Earth without guidance. She is beginning the construction of an extensive stainless-steel 3D diagram that documents the intricate webs of writer’s connections and histories, which become more and more clear with each column. This diagram already takes up most of her backyard.