Guest Host Chris Campbell

Welcome to the Stone Soup Weekly Digest! This is where I share what I'm up to and some of my favorite things from around the internet. Subscribe to Stone Soup to get this in your inbox every week.

Hello from the road! I have officially started my sabbatical and am kicking it off by driving a cargo van full of stuff from LA to the Bay Area. Before I introduce this week's guest host,  I want to share a couple of resources with you. 

Distribute this guide to interacting with ICE throughout your communities, as widely as possible, to help as many people as we can reach. Know your rights and exercise them whenever you have the chance. 

Check out this RPG-style guide to surviving under fascism, and share it with whoever might benefit from it. 

Now, meet your guest host, Chris Campbell! Chris is a speculative fiction writer whose work has appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, FIYAH, and khōréō. Chris’ contributions to Afrofuturist literature have received the generous support of the Massachusetts Cultural Council. He aims to recontextualize the past to center Black people in their own narratives and use fiction to craft yet unimagined futures. He reads for Apex Magazine and is an alumnus of the Viable Paradise and Clarion West writing workshops. Chris is the editor of New Year, New You: A Speculative Fiction Anthology of Reinvention. Find him at @chriscampbell.bsky.social. 

Take us away, Chris!

-gailey

Well, here we are, closing out the first month of a new year and once again living in interesting times.

I’m grateful to the Stone Soup community for sharing the past few weeks with contributors to the New Year, New You Anthology of Speculative Fiction. Allison, Trea, and F.E. are incredibly talented writers, and following in their footsteps is no small challenge.

So, in a shameless ploy for your goodwill, I’m happy to announce that a new member has just joined my family! Baby and mother are both healthy and unbearably cute, and I’ve learned that sleep is a sucker’s game—especially when you’re trying to write a newsletter that doesn’t sound like the fevered ravings of a man whose brain has been replaced by three weasels in a trench coat.

The Return of Fantasy Magazine

One of the things I’m most excited to celebrate is the return of Fantasy Magazine. Being a fan of short fiction means getting used to seeing your favorite markets shut down, so when one roars back to life, it’s cause for celebration. With Arley Sorg returning, now joined by Shingai Njeri Kagunda at the helm, I have no doubt that Fantasy will continue pushing boundaries and discovering the bold new voices that keep us all on our toes.

Here’s one of my favorite stories from the magazine’s previous run, written by the incoming editor, Shingai: And This Is How to Stay Alive

Fair warning: Shingai doesn’t play games. She’ll give you an amazing story—but you’ll pay with a piece of your soul.

What the Funk!

Lately, I’ve been reflecting on my role as an artist and diving even deeper into my roots as an Afrofuturist. In that spirit, I want to share a hidden gem and a landmark piece in Afrofuturist history:

The Last Angel of History (John Akomfrah) – Part documentary, part speculative fiction, all resistance.

This film redefines Black history as it moves through time, starting with Robert Johnson’s legendary crossroads before leaping forward to another trickster—the Data Thief. As he navigates history, he searches for fragments called “techno-fossils,” scattered throughout Black history, to construct a trans-temporal technology that holds the key to the future. His only clue? Mothership Connection.

The film features interviews with luminaries like Octavia Butler and Samuel R. Delany, whose influence is deeply felt in the books I’m currently porcupining with sticky tabs. (Also, if you're interested in my own take on a Mothership Connection, check out my short story Nightskin’s Landing in khōréō magazine.)

CHRIS IS CURRENTLY READING: 

Right now, two books sit at the top of my reading pile, slowly accumulating layers of notes and ideas I know I’ll need to revisit. Both authors look to Delany and Butler as artists who reveal the dangers we face while reminding us of our duty to ourselves to continue dreaming of better futures.

Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by José Esteban Muñoz

Cruising Utopia arrived in 2009 to insist that queerness must be reimagined as a futurity-bound phenomenon, an insistence on the potentiality of another world that would crack open the pragmatic present. Part manifesto, part love-letter to the past and the future, José Esteban Muñoz argued that the here and now were not enough and issued an urgent call for the revivification of the queer political imagination.

On the anniversary of its original publication, this edition includes two essays that extend and expand the project of Cruising Utopia, as well as a new foreword by the current editors of Sexual Cultures, the book series he co-founded with Ann Pellegrini 20 years ago. This 10th anniversary edition celebrates the lasting impact that Cruising Utopia has had on the decade of queer of color critique that followed and introduces a new generation of readers to a future not yet here.

Barnes & Noble | Bad River Website | Local Library | Find an Indie Bookstore

Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism by Alex Zamalin

Within the history of African American struggle against racist oppression that often verges on dystopia, a hidden tradition has depicted a transfigured world. Daring to speculate on a future beyond white supremacy, black utopian artists and thinkers offer powerful visions of ways of being that are built on radical concepts of justice and freedom. They imagine a new black citizen who would inhabit a world that soars above all existing notions of the possible.

In Black Utopia, Alex Zamalin offers a groundbreaking examination of African American visions of social transformation and their counterutopian counterparts. Considering figures associated with racial separatism, postracialism, anticolonialism, Pan-Africanism, and Afrofuturism, he argues that the black utopian tradition continues to challenge American political thought and culture. Black Utopia spans black nationalist visions of an ideal Africa, the fiction of W. E. B. Du Bois, and Sun Ra’s cosmic mythology of alien abduction. Zamalin casts Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler as political theorists and reflects on the antiutopian challenges of George S. Schuyler and Richard Wright. Their thought proves that utopianism, rather than being politically immature or dangerous, can invigorate political imagination. Both an inspiring intellectual history and a critique of present power relations, this book suggests that, with democracy under siege across the globe, the black utopian tradition may be our best hope for combating injustice.

Barnes & Noble | Bad River Website | Local Library | Find an Indie Bookstore

CHRIS RECOMMENDS A FEATURED NEW RELEASE: Haunt Sweet Home by Sarah Pinkser

I have been hyped about this for a while, and if you know Sarah Pinsker’s work, you will be too. As a writer and a reader, I have a keen appreciation for boldness, and as far as I’m concerned, bold isn’t just a way to describe Sarah—Sarah is the measure by which I understand what bold really means. She delights in writing herself into corners and looking for ways to get into trouble so that she can show us how much fun getting into trouble can be, and that a corner is just two solid walls to push against.

“Don’t talk to day about what we do at night.”

When aimless twenty-something Mara lands a job as the night-shift production assistant on her cousin’s ghost hunting/home makeover reality TV show Haunt Sweet Home, she quickly determines her new role will require a healthy attitude toward duplicity. But as she hides fog machines in the woods and improvises scares to spook new homeowners, a series of unnerving incidents on set and a creepy new coworker force Mara to confront whether the person she's truly been deceiving and hiding from all along—is herself.

Barnes & Noble | Bad River Website | Local Library | Find an Indie Bookstore

Alasdair Stuart Reviews: Interstate 35

The incredibly insightful Alasdair Stuart is a pop culture genius, reviewer extraordinaire, and regular Digest contributor. Be sure to subscribe to The Full Lid for more brilliant pop culture analysis.

A single nuclear detonation over Texas breaks the state and shatters your life. Years after the detonation, scavengers pick over the scabs on the world. They look for scrap, treasure, escape, pieces of the world that used to be. You're one of them. Tonight, you're going home.

Julie Muncy and Radiant Array's debut game is an interactive visual novel that takes you on a journey down into the wreckage. Muncy's dialogue is deceptively relaxed and calm, but seethes with the same tension as the landscape. You and your partners bicker good-naturedly, keeping each other at a distance but not too far. Individual survivors, together alone in the ruins of a partially finished apocalypse and all of you with notes on how it could be done better. Ames, your driver and bodyguard is the son of survivalists and knows that the end should have been both much neater and way more definitive. Lori is a quiet, focused mercenary with boxer's tape on her nose and every secret guarded. You're an open book of memory, haunted by the childhood you spent in the old world and the choices you made to get here. None of you have any idea if you're doing the right thing. All of you keep travelling.

Some things take you to flashes of memory that you can opt to keep or discard. On my first playthrough I kept everything, cocooning myself in the wreckage. That choice has relevance both to the plot and to the shape of your experience. It's matched by the increasingly sweet, painful reminiscences you have as you get closer to your goal. The church you joined to see your crush. The computer you helped run for the Priest. The Stadium turned settlement where child you played and adult you barters for work. Nothing ever really ends and sometimes that's what really hurts. Especially as the game steps up into an ending that melds personal and metaphorical together in a landscape made new by the bomb and familiar by your presence in it.

That combination requires strong design all the way across the board and Interstate 35 is one of the best designed games I've played this year. Visager's aching ambient sound wall soundtrack is one part Paris, Texas to one part Until the End of the World. The UI and background art by Ariyeh Korva is loose and beautiful, mapping the sweeps of memory and emotion onto the landscape of Texas and the structure of the game. Porcelain Bones illustrates the world with paintings that meld the lonely, stark realism of Hopper and that same tension. Muncy uses the bomb as the carrier wave for a story that's gently brutal in how open it is. The achingly beautiful sunsets, the shattered landscape, the sudden moments of impossible, possibly Fortean beauty. All of them are gorgeous. None of them are safe. You keep going, because that's what you can do.

Interstate 35 is an intensely personal, beautiful story about what the world looks like after it stops ending. It's honest and open, cautious and bruised. Wreckage as map, memory as destination and truth as something beautiful, glimpsed at the edge of the road. I played it last week and I still haven’t stopped thinking about it. 

Interstate 35 is out on PC now.

Thank you, Chris! 

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In the meantime, do what you can. Care for yourself and the people around you. Believe that the world can be better than it is now. Never give up.

—gailey