[Plura-list] Justin C Key's "The World Wasn't Ready For You"

Tue Sep 19 08:14:57 EDT 2023

Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/19/justin-c-key/

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On September 22, I'm (virtually) presenting at the DIG Festival in Modena, Italy

https://dig-awards.org/en/dig-festival-2023-first-speakers-announced/

That night, I'll be in person at LA's Book Soup for the launch of Justin C Key's "The World Wasn’t Ready for You"

https://www.booksoup.com/event/justin-c-key

On September 27, I'll be at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles with Brian Merchant for a joint launch for my new book *The Internet Con* and his new book, *Blood in the Machine*:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-internet-con-by-cory-doctorow-blood-in-the-machine-by-brian-merchant-tickets-696349940417

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Today's links

* Justin C Key's "The World Wasn't Ready For You": Black horror that cuts with a surgical scalpel.

* Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.

* This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018, 2022

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading

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🚉 Justin C Key's "The World Wasn't Ready For You"

*The World Wasn't Ready For You* is Justin C Key's first book. It's a short story collection, from a major publisher. This is basically unheard of. Big publishers rarely publish collections, and when they do, it's almost always after a string of extremely successful novels:

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-world-wasnt-ready-for-you-justin-c-key?variant=41016598036514

Yes, there are exceptions. Ted Chiang. Kelly Link.

And now, Justin C Key. To be in such company is, as they say, a big fucking deal.

I can't say I'm surprised. Key was my student at the Clarion West writing workshop - a year full of standout writers among whom Key was still a standout. I was immensely impressed with his work then, and when I found out that he was also an MD and a father, a young man juggling an unimaginably intense work and family schedule and still producing this polished, scary, *precise* work, I knew he could have great things ahead of him.

But to be honest, I wasn't sure he *would* write. Key was so obviously brilliant and competent, and had such an important dayjob, that I could easily have imagined him deciding that making up stories was fun, but that it was not nearly so rewarding as his other vocations.

I was wrong - and right. In the years since Clarion, Key's work has acquired a kind of medical precision. When Key stabs you, the knife slides right between your ribs and goes straight into the big arteries of your heart, slicing you so quickly that you hardly notice until you are slain.

These are all horror stories, though some of them are science fiction too, and more to the point, they'r *Black* horror stories. In his afterword, Key writes about his early fascination with horror, the catharsis he felt in watching nightmares unspool on screen or off the page. And then, he writes, came the dawning recognition that the Black characters in these stories were always there as cannon-fodder, often nameless, usually picked off early.

These stories represent Key's long rumination on the conjunction of Blackness and horror. Of course, that gets back to racism, in the way that, say, Jordan Peele's work does, or in the manner of NK Jemisin's post-Lovecraft Cthuloid tales:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/09/the-old-crow-is-getting-slow/#i-love-ny

But "Black horror" isn't merely parables about racism. In the deft hands of these writers - and now, Key - the stories are horror in which Blackness is a *fact*, sometimes a central one, and that fact is ever a complication, limiting how the characters move through space, interact with authority, and relate to one another.

The eight stories - mostly long - in *The World Wasn't Ready For You* deal with parenting, health, prison, corruption, and art - and they do so through hauntings and body horror and tension wound so tight you want to scream.

This is a brilliant and auspicious beginning from a brilliant and auspicious writer.

Key's book launches at LA's Book Soup on September 22, and I'll be there with him as interlocutor. I couldn't be more honored by this, and I hope you'll come out and see us:

https://www.booksoup.com/event/justin-c-key

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🚉 Hey look at this

* The Edgar Allan Poe Library | The Nevermore https://nevermore.rip

* Updated COVID-19 Vaccines Available for Adults at No Cost https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/programs/bridge/index.html (h/t Kottke)

* Trust Us: Inside the Jersey Offshore Investigation https://open.spotify.com/episode/4gx1BFPDvjFL21wl8iFUnO?si=f4c94df299a3413b

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🚉 This day in history

#20yrsago You Might Be An Anti-Spam Kook If… https://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.html

#20yrsago IEEE members: save democracy from a broken standards-committee! https://web.archive.org/web/20030922031714/https://www.eff.org/Activism/E-voting/IEEE/

#15yrsago American Psychological Association members can’t aid in military torture https://web.archive.org/web/20080805001530/https://www.apa.org/governance/resolutions/work-settings.html

#15yrsago Welcome to Fear City: a guide to scare tourists away from NYC https://www.flickr.com/search/?w=58226389@N07&q=fear city

#10yrsago NSA contracted with notorious French spy-tech company VUPEN https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2013/sep/17/nsas-contract-vupen-darth-vader-cybersecurity/

#10yrsago Asbestos-bound first edition of Fahrenheit 451 https://web.archive.org/web/20160316135700/https://www.ebay.com/itm/190905167150?ssPageName=STRK%3AMESELX%3AIT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649

#10yrsago Report shows how the anti-SOPA fight came from the bottom up https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2295953

#5yrsago Ted Chiang lecture on interspecies communications https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7rkojpnwOE

#5yrsago Your wireless carrier is definitely throttling video, but not because of network congestion (Verizon’s the worst) https://www.vice.com/en/article/bjanw5/wireless-carriers-throttle-video-for-no-good-reason-researchers-find

#5yrsago My closing Decentralized Web Summit keynote: “Big Tech’s problem is Big, not Tech” https://decentralizedweb.net/videos/keynote-cory-doctorowbig-techs-problem-is-big-not-tech/

#5yrsago Your life will be better if you turn off push notifications (and all notifications) https://www.vice.com/en/article/7xjb79/turn-off-push-notifications

#5yrsago 30 years after cyberpunk, Japan is still the (greying, insular, shrinking, climate-wracked) future https://offramp.sciarc.edu/articles/a-slow-utopia

#5yrsago Rice University eliminates tuition for all but wealthiest students, makes housing free for poorest https://www.npr.org/2018/09/18/649160232/rice-university-says-middle-class-students-wont-have-to-pay-tuition

#5yrsago Cloud computing and DRM: a match made in hell https://web.archive.org/web/20180918200400/https://publicknowledge.org/news-blog/blogs/its-always-drms-fault

#5yrsago 3D print this Harriet Tubman stamp and fix all those twenties that Mnuchin forgot to take Andrew Jackson off of https://tubmanstamp.com

#5yrsago Anita Hill on how sexual harassment allegations should be handled https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/18/opinion/anita-hill-brett-kavanaugh-clarence-thomas.html

#5yrsago Kalamazoo criminalizes homelessness, arrests city commissioner and other activists https://www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/2018/09/police_arrive_at_bronson_park.html

#5yrsago Denmark’s largest bank laundered €200B through its Estonian branch, ignoring glaring warning signs https://www.ft.com/content/cbc4b02a-bbda-11e8-8274-55b72926558f

#5yrsago Germany’s far-right top spy just lost his job after gaslighting the country about right-wing, violent mob https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/18/germanys-domestic-spy-chief-hans-georg-maassen-chemnitz

#1yrago How to ditch Facebook without ditching your friends https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/19/interoperable-facebook/#federated

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🚉 Colophon

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

* A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

* Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025

* The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2024

* Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

* Moral Hazard, a short story for MIT Tech Review's 12 Tomorrows. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION

* Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

Latest podcast: Plausible Sentence Generators https://craphound.com/news/2023/09/17/plausible-sentence-generators/

Upcoming appearances:

* DIG Festival (Modena, Italy), Sept 22
https://dig-awards.org/en/dig-festival-2023-first-speakers-announced/

* Launch for Justin C Key's "The World Wasn’t Ready for You," Book Soup (LA), Sept 22
https://www.booksoup.com/event/justin-c-key

* Launch for "The Internet Con" and Brian Merchant's "Blood in the Machine," Chevalier's Books (LA), Sept 27
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-internet-con-by-cory-doctorow-blood-in-the-machine-by-brian-merchant-tickets-696349940417

* An Evening with VE Schwab (Boise), Oct 2
https://www.thecabinidaho.org/all-events/ve-schwab

* Wired Nextfest (Milano), Oct 7-8
https://eventi.wired.it/nextfest23-milano

* The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books (Minneapolis), Oct 15
https://moonpalacebooks.com/events/30127

* 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing keynote (Minneapolis), Oct 16
https://cscw.acm.org/2023/index.php/keynotes/

* 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities (Charleston, WV), Oct 19
https://festivallcharleston.com/venue/university-of-charleston/

* Seizing the Means of Computation (Edinburgh Futures Institute), Oct 25
https://efi.ed.ac.uk/event/seizing-the-means-of-computation-with-cory-doctorow/

Recent appearances:

* How to Take Back the Internet (Wired Have a Nice Future)
https://www.wired.com/story/have-a-nice-future-podcast-21/

*   Sci-fi and Amazon's empire (The Workers' Speculative Society)
https://soundcloud.com/reimaginevalue/doctorow

* An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification and Throw It Into Reverse (Defcon 31)
https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2031/DEF%20CON%2031%20video%20and%20slides/DEF%20CON%2031%20-%20An%20Audacious%20Plan%20to%20Halt%20the%20Internet%27s%20Enshittification%20-%20Cory%20Doctorow.mp4

Latest books:

* 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 (print edition: https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907) (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:

* The Lost Cause: a post-Green New Deal eco-topian novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias, Tor Books, November 2023

* The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books, February 2024

This work - excluding any serialized fiction - is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
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