Introducing POLYESTER, a science fiction.

POLYESTER is a story told by a cis, white, queer woman who’s living during peak oil, works as a sex worker, and who’s home city is destroyed while on a trip–along with people she loves. It’s about loneliness, petroleum, community responses to trauma, anarchism, State surveillance, fancy dresses, and resilience. Read her journal entries here.

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Why sci-fi? In the words of Adrienne Marie Brown, reading sci-fi, “doesn’t feel like the education it is, until you finish it and realize you have been deeply challenged to rethink how you are living.” It’s a creative space where anything can happen, social interactions and laws of physics can be changed easily. And so, it’s a place we can vision new futures — where we can ask the question: what would it look like if xyz was true? What might the politics, people, and places of a future that includes survival, hope, and authenticity look like? If I lived somewhere less brutal, or where people used different strategies, what might happen?

Check out the newly edited Transformative Justice Strategic Sci Fi Reader, created by four powerhouses of visionary / social movement / radical thinking Adrienne Marie Brown, Jenna Peters-Golden, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs: http://adriennemareebrown.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Transformative-Justice-Strategic-Science-Justice-Reader.docx. And author & YA blogger Rebecca Peters-Golden did the re-design! It is 100% no accident that this reader is produced by a group of queer women, and primarily by femmes and folks of color.

As for me writing this sci-fi story, I started it when I moved to NYC in 2005 and was both brutally lonely and totally sad that I literally, physically couldn’t go back to Toronto, where I’d been living with a lot of friends, loves, and art. The obvious course of action was to write my feelings out as I contemplated how horrible a city could be when you were cast into it without a net and without people.

I went travelling in 2009-2010, and I felt dreamy, surreal, and knew a lot more about creating and caretaking radical community. I wrote more of this then, as I slipped along the edges of many worlds.

And now, in 2013, as I am recovering from intense grief and have finished several large projects, I finally again have space to imagine futures, and am finishing this book that’s been with me for almost a decade.

The online version of the book is shared here: http://www.damienluxe.com/polyester-a-sci-fi-novel/. It’s partly written and parts are also being written as I go. I plan to release a weeks’ entries every other week or so. I’d welcome comments, feedback, sharing, critiques, and your sci-fi responses.