I have been writing on and off for nearly 20 years, almost exclusively science fiction and fantasy. None of it has ever seen the light of day, but I have dozens of different worldbuilding projects and accompanying half-finished stories, easily thousands of pages of material. Most of it written during my late teens/early twenties, and most of it absolute junk. Not junk in terms of skill, but rather the content itself- there is a serious lack in my understanding of the world in much of my early writing, particularly my science fiction. In trying to tell stories about the future of our species, it instead comes across as profoundly shallow, and not in an endearing way.
In my late 20s, as the first Trump term wound to a close and a global pandemic drew frighteningly near, like many of you my worldview was completely realigned- slowly at first, but then like a flood as decades of political and religious mythology were stripped away by reality. During this personal realignment, I found myself rethinking much of my writing.
Red Future was the first project in my new “Second Era” of personal canon. There is a great deal more nuance to my writing journey, but for the sake of brevity, I’m considering all of my post-pandemic writing as my “Second Era”. (If you’re interested, I would happily detail the various phases of my writing journey along with snippets of some of the aforementioned teenage cringe.) Red Future was a silly placeholder name for a far-future sci fi series that started as “fully-automated luxury gay space communism”, or “Star Trek but actually communist”. It’s become much more than that now, so I’ve decided to steal that placeholder name and use it for my Substack.
In terms of Substack, “Red Future” will be my fiction writings, my musings on political economy and world events, and my thoughts on history and religion. The fiction will include selections from:
The Red Future canon, including the “main” story of humanity in the year 3000, as well as “spinoffs” that include a man with no memory embroiled in a revolution on a far-off megastructure in space, and a Doctor Who knockoff.
The Red Magic canon, which is fantasy and unrelated to Red Future, and tells the story of magic users that are exploited by the nobility of a country similar to 16th-century Holy Roman Empire.
And the “People’s Republic of Haathe”, with stories of the people who live in the last-surviving socialist country from a long-collapsed socialist bloc… who are also in direct communion with a quasi-deity of immense power.
As far as non-fiction goes, I have a great many thoughts on current events and politics, political theory and political economy (as opposed to mainstream/classical economics), religion, and history- the latter two in particular as it pertains to people’s power and people’s movements. In fact, I do not consider any of my writing as separate from each other. My fiction and non-fiction interests come from the same place, and I often have the same goals for them, just different mediums and audiences. The through-lines between all my writing will become clear quite quickly.
My interest in expressing myself on social media has gone through the floor, not least due to the abysmal state of the internet today, from endless AI slop to social media platforms being owned by megalomaniacal billions who use them to promote the will of the powerful over that of the powerless. I have found myself returning to my roots, those hormonal days of adolescence where I would write endlessly on my Xanga page and inside multitudes of various spiral-bound notebooks. Thus, we come to Substack- the perfect nostalgia-bait for aging millennials like myself who have found themselves increasingly alienated from an internet we used to call home. If you’re out there reading this, I’m glad to have you. If it’s just me posting into the void, so’s the better. I would probably do well not to have to explain some of the things I’ll be posting here at the next family gathering.