The Machine of the World, by Phenderson Djèlí Clark

Phenderson Djèlí Clark’s flash fiction, The Machine of the World, is one of the stories that will be coming on Season 2 of The Kaleidocast, and I’m honored to have had the opportunity to make my observations as it emerged into Meta-Brooklyn, recorded here in my sketchbook.

The Kickstarter for Season 2 of The Kaleidocast has a bunch of interesting backer rewards (including prints of my work!), but it’s most important to me that they’re pushing to become a professional market, to pay what the Science Fiction Writers of America call a “professional rate”. If you’re like me, you want to make sure artists make enough money — maybe more than enough money! — to eat and make more art. Help them help their authors!

It’s not abstract to me. Not only am I facing the challenges of an artist’s income, but also in the last few weeks, I’ve had this rolling wonder of getting to know the Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers group. We’ve shared food, we’ve shared creative projects, we’ve become Dinner Family, and we’ve thrown things at each other across a restaurant.

And it started because the Kaleidocast’s managing editor, Rob Cameron, and I met last year at Readercon. This year, it was more than meeting, and I’m really happy to know this ball of intensely creative, warm, hilarious people, and I want them to have to start looking at their day jobs as a drag on their income, rather than looking at their authorship in that light.

If you wanna hear the kind of thing they’re up to, subscribe to The Kaleidocast on iTunes or Soundcloud (while there’s still a Soundcloud to subscribe on)! Give them a good listen and think about how much better the world would be if there was more of that.

Wanna know another great project? The Fifth World is a great project. It’s an optimistic shared science fiction world about the neotribal future of post-industrial humans. Check it out!

The only Solarpunk RPG I've ever seen.

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