Book Review: The World After Amazon - Stories from Amazon Workers by Xenia Benivolski

This is a brilliant idea for a short story collection. Gather a group of non-writers, all of whom have experienced the dystopia of working for Amazon, and support them to write speculative science fiction. Given how futuristic Amazon is, perhaps they have a unique insight into what its future holds. Or, as the rather academic intro puts it:

The Worker as Futurist project asks another question: if SF is so important to the operations of capitalism in the twenty-first century, does it also have a radical potential that might lend itself to the struggles of workers and other oppressed people within, against and beyond that system? (see Jameson 2005; Roke 2020)

I'll be honest, it feels a little patronising. The project articulates its theory of change (which only slightly puts me in mind of Peter Cook's famous quote) - hoping that radical fiction might move mountains:

We at the Worker as Futurist project believe that workers can fruitfully understand, theorize, and plot forms of resistance to capitalism through creative expression, especially through the process of writing, particularly within the genre of SF. If, as we have argued, SF is now active in important ways at the very heart of capitalism, maybe that genre is also somehow the system’s achilles’ heel?

Still, it makes for a fascinating introduction to a somewhat uneven set of stories. There is some delightfully weird fiction - I especially enjoyed the idea of the University of the Phoenix using AI to write curses on corporations. In amongst that there's some fairly standard stories of worker exploitation, a few overwritten pieces, and one or two which would make great full length books.

The afterword is very clear about the reason for this book existing:

To me, it never mattered whether or not the stories written by the workers in this project would be considered “good” by the well-read literary elite. To me, it only mattered that those who took up the challenge wrote. And by writing, and by speaking their truths, they exploded the paradigm that would render their subjectivity nonexistent.

And I heartily agree with that. I'd rather read a new writer explore the problem-space rather than yet-another trilogy about romance magicians.

The book is free to download or, if you think the master's tools can dismantle the master's house, you can purchase a copy on Amazon.