This entry was "Fort Apache the Exchange", pending publication in GUERILLA GENESIS PRESS
There are days when you wake up and realize your story has surpassed its best-by date. Such was the case today with "Fort Apache the Exchange".
God knows it's not an OLD story and usually I feel justified in peddling these things 'til they have a long, white beard. The danger, though, of doing topical/satirical SF is just that because you're dealing with specific topics and specific issues in specific times, you end up putting an expiration date on your work....which is why for the most part I prefer to deal with BROAD, UNIVERSAL politics as opposed to specific issues tied to specific time frames.
Obviously, a chunk of this spoofs colonialism, which is a pretty broad subject that you can do a lot with. Colonialism, though, is just a bug rather than the feature.
At the time I wrote it the TEA Party had some wheels under them and the Occupy Movement was very much on the wane. I was still trying to process my own poor associations from my five-minutes in the local version of the Occupy Movement, but that's another rant for another time. So basing it around what I saw going on as well as my own years of experience as an activist, it was my own look at the way Neoliberals (my favorite targets), elites in general and/or the people in charge of any given system view and relate to activists, protesters and/or movements.
From my own lens, having dealt with both power structures and their friends and mouthpieces in the media, elites do not understand activists, or at the very least they make a disingenuous show of not understanding them, instead dismissing their concerns as "incoherent" or "conspiracy theories". The Aliens in "Fort Apache" are actually on the benevolent side (or at least that's how they see themselves)...of course, there's the genuine culture barrier.
Thing is, at this point in time this chunk of history is just water under the bridge and there's really no pressing relevance to push. I can't really justify keeping "Fort Apache" in circulation so you all get it here.
THIS WEEK'S PLAYLIST:
1. WE'RE DESPERATE (Rhino L.A. Punk comp)
2. THE BOLSHOI-A Way: The Best of the Bolshoi
