Screen capture from YouTube
A.M. Freeman and the other fine folks from Superversive Press who organized the Bonnie Oliver anthology Impossible Hope, written for the benefit of Bonnie who suffers from Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, invited all of the contributing authors to a livestream last Sunday.
I wasn’t able to make it for scheduling reasons, but each of the available writers were briefly interviewed by Ms. Freeman, talking about their stories and why they became involved.
Proposed cover for “Impossible Hope” anthology
Last February, I mentioned a charitable effort on behalf of a young woman named Bonnie Oliver where authors were asked to donate a fictional story based on the theme “Impossible Hope.” Bonnie suffers from Complex Chiari Malformation, Craniocervical and Atlanto-axial Instability and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome type three, which in this case means she requires very expensive surgery.
A.M Freeman organized the project to recruit authors providing stories for an anthology which, when completed, will be sold and the proceeds will go for Bonnie’s medical expenses.
My story is called “The Switchman’s Lantern.”
A.M. Freeman as found on her blog.
A little while ago (as I write this), I came across something on A.M. Freeman’s blog called When The Satire Site Can’t Recognize Satire. It was written in response to an article at Cracked.com called 5 Ridiculously Implausible Things The Alt-Right Is Afraid Of (Yes, I ripped off the title). Apparently, the missive’s author S. Peter Davis read the Superversive Press anthology Forbidden Thoughts, first published in January 2017 (to which Ms. Freeman contributed a story), edited by Jason Rennie, and with a foreword by the highly controversial Milo Yiannopoulos, and didn’t like it very much (Oh, keep in mind, I’ve read some of Mr. Yiannopoulos’s work and frankly, I don’t have much use for it).
Reading his review, and assuming his rendition of the stories contained within the anthology are accurate, yes, the themes and content are wildly exaggerated outside the realm of probability, but that was exactly the point. As Freeman pointed out, they were written as satire, blowing modern controversial topics way, way out of proportion to prove a point. The same was done in another Superversive anthology I read and reviewed called To Be Men: Stories Celebrating Masculinity. Yes, they’re all written from a very conservative and sometimes religious perspective, but the concern here, and probably the reason for the existence of Superversive Press, is that SF/F is increasingly becoming biased (or so is the belief) toward the left and perhaps the progressive far left (alt-left?), such that the rest of us don’t have a voice in the genre.
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