Please join Max Haiven and a “prime” collection of authors as we celebrate the publication of The World After Amazon!
The World After Amazon is a collection of 9 short speculative stories, written by rank-and-file workers at the corporation that has transformed the way we read and so much more. Amazon's sci-fi propaganda tells the story of a company using cutting-edge technology to deliver a utopia of cheap consumer convenience. But its workers pay the price, toiling in dystopian conditions to create a future that will exclude them. What happens when those workers reclaim the radical imagination and their power to tell their own stories?
We will have copies of The World After Amazon available at the book launch and it can also be read or downloaded online for free, and is also available as a podcast and audiobook. For more information, visit http://afteramazon.world.
Stories from Rank-and-File Amazon Workers
In Ibrahim Alsahary’s “The Iron Uprising,” robots and humans come together in common struggle… and in love. Cory Gluck’s “Thalia in Albios” depicts one woman’s journey through a dystopian future, from terrified housecleaner to fearless revolutionary. What could go wrong if scientists tried to artificially enhance the empathy that people have lost in an age of techno-isolation? In Dartagnan’s “Relentless” we find out.
In Anneth Chepkoech’s “Life After Amazon” a young migrant boy dreams of creating an online retail platform that respects and values workers like his father. Pearl Cecil Sigur Ramsey’s “ANYBODY HOME?” presents a podcast from the end of the world, where corporations can even exploit screams of rebellion.
Several writers chose to remain anonymous. “Forever on the Clock” tells the story of a worker who quits Amazon only to discover the prison where he is being held looks very familiar… In “The Dark Side of Convenience” workers are kept so busy working for Amazon they don’t realize the apocalypse the company is helping to create. After Amazon’s fall, a local ruler uses violence and fear to dominate the island of Zanjara. It’s up to his son to find “The Museum of Prime” and restore the balance.“New Entry” takes us to the far future, where humanity has found the source of infinite energy, but is not yet free from the power of propaganda…
These nine stories are accompanied by an introduction to the project and essays by the coordinating team. Max Haiven writes of the figure of the alien and workers’ experiences of alienation.Sarah Olutolameditates with W.E.B. Dubois on the power of words to change the world. Graeme Webb reframes speculative writing as a form of play that opens the radical imagination. And Xenia Benivolski reflects on how, in both Communist and Capitalist societies, speculative fiction gives rise to subversive dreams.
Max Haiven is a writer, teacher, and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination. His most recent books are Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (2022), Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (2020), and Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (2018). Haiven is editor of VAGABONDS, a series of short, radical books from Pluto Press. He teaches at Lakehead University, where he directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL). He led the Worker as Futurist Project, of which this book is a part.