Margaret Killjoy

"While so much of our other work—theory and direct action protest alike—presents answers to the world, fiction presents questions."

"We need to be inspired and we need to inspire. And fiction offers the chance to explore things deeply in ways that other mediums can't."

"(about anarchists) we've got a wonderful critique of failure: if you don't fail from time to time, you're not setting your goals high enough."

"we need to tell stories about ourselves, because others are talking too. Every book and movie out there with a cop as a hero, saving the world from terrorists and thugs hellbent on chaos? We need to counter that. We need books about the oppressed, about the beauty of resistance."

"(SFP: Can you tell us your work’s message in 25 words or less?) MK: We, all of us, need to explore our own agency as individuals and communities in order to fix this dying planet. (2022)"

"(SFP: What authors are you inspired by?) MK: Well now I’d be a liar if I didn’t say Tolkien. I like authors that talk about power and talk about community. So Tolkien (for all his faults), Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Cory Doctorow, Terry Pratchett, I love them. (2022)"

"(SFP: Where do you think science fiction as a genre is headed?) MK: Well, probably all sci-fi that doesn’t directly address climate change is going to read as nonsensical fantasy soon enough. So I think the future is there. Personally, I hope it heads in the direction of offering alternatives, instead of just saying “here’s some stuff that’s bad.” (2022)"

"(do you have any advice for aspiring writers?) MK: Store at least 5 gallons of water per person and a week’s worth of food in your pantry. Connect with your local mutual aid organizations, or start your own. Talk seriously about how you and your friends and family will attempt to interfere with the global resurgence of fascism, utilizing the skill sets and resources available to you. You can’t write fiction on a dead planet. Furthermore, it’s our participation in life that allows us to reflect life with accuracy and beauty on the page. Find inspiration for your characters from people in the world instead of people in books. Find inspiration for conflict and resolution in history and the present instead of what you’ve read in other novels. Live life as fully as you can, feel things as fully as you can. Your life will be better and your books will be better. (2022)"

"it’s just a big inner woven net that is the way to get things done."

"survival isn’t about hoarding supplies, and hiding in the basement, but instead about building connections with community and building resilient communities. And sometimes hoarding food in your basement!"

"fiction – not just written fiction, but stories in general – are how we generate what we perceive as possible, as a society and as individuals. And so we need stories that show other ways of living, besides the one that we’re in now that is obviously doing us all a great bit of disservice."

"at some point, you realize that almost all fiction, especially science fiction, is activist fiction. Sometimes it’s an activist fiction for the status quo! But for the most part, it’s not, there’s like people all over the right and left and then weird combinations of both right and left, all over the history of science fiction."

"That was the first interview I did for the project [the interview with Ursula Le Guin]. And talking about what role fiction has within social change. That really opened my eyes. I saw them as very separate activities. And I no longer do, although I also do believe that it’s also easy to go too far the other way and be like, well, I’m doing my part, I sit at home and take no risks! And, you know, I do think that the actual work of making things change in this world involve organization, and they involve direct action, and they involve confronting oppressive powers directly."

"(Q: Do you see all your creative work across the different bands and projects as being connected?)…they’re also just coming in from the same place in terms of how I see the world, in terms of how I see the physical manifestation of different thematic ideas, of what Gods are and aren’t. All that stuff will tie in together. And it’s fun. I totally get now why so many writers that I love are just 50 years into one wild, weird world building thing. Or just declare all their work a multiverse. So they’d be like, yeah, it’s all tied together somehow. I totally get it now."

"I don’t believe the places of friction for a reader should be in the prose. I believe they should be in the ideas that are being presented instead."

"There’s no other issue more pressing for everyone alive enough to read these words than climate change. Which is saying something, because we’ve also got a fascism problem — but they’re not unrelated problems."

"(about Leonard Peltier) We always idealize wild rebels who refuse to bow to empire when we read about them in fantasy books, but some of those rebels are alive and imprisoned by the same people who draw their salaries from our taxes."

"I think that story is incredibly good at mitigating suffering. Overall, most people lead fairly hard lives with a lot of physical pain and emotional pain. And being able to step outside oneself every now and then I think is crucial for our mental health."

"when you set magic] in the real world, if you’re honest to the subject, you’re mostly going to write horror because it’s about power and playing with power. I’m interested in understanding how people shape power communally and collectively amongst each other."

"I believe that art involves reaching into the sea of possibility, the void, and coming back with ideas in order to then build those ideas into things, so I’m going to use similar tools, similar building blocks, similar themes, regardless of the medium. As I come up with ideas, I have to figure out which format is best for those ideas."

"On some level, everything I write is about the fact that we are of the earth and we’ll return to it, and I can’t help it and I don’t want to help it because I think that reading should connect us to something grounding whenever possible. And I think that there’s actually nothing more grounding than realizing that we are dirt temporarily taking on a different form."

"(Q: what is your favorite part about launching a new thing into the world?) When people indicate to me that something in what I have written has been useful to them, and that they take something from what I’ve written and find their own ways of applying it and make it their own. So, it’s not like when people quote me, but more when I can see that I have been a participant in the great art of shaping the world. And when people leave me alone about how pretentious it is to talk about art."

"I think the human condition is knowing that you’ll die. And I actually don’t think that books have to be a way to avoid thinking about that. I think instead they can be a way to find peace with that. I think feeling that it’s okay that this is going to happen is necessary for our well-being. But when you imagine the full breadth of what’s possible as a human being, I think you have to come back to an awareness of mortality and to seek out lives of meaning and beauty. And I think that fiction can be a really good way to give us ideas of how we can be in the world to try and accomplish those things."

"What I would argue is really useful about studying and understanding history is not just looking for these patterns as they repeat, but to look at trajectories…if you want to hit a ball and you know where the ball is, that’s useful. But unless you also know where the ball was, you can’t tell where the ball is going. In order to understand trajectory, you need more than one point of reference. History provides us a second point of reference. I admit, most of the patterns that I see as they relate to queerness and transness and things like that throughout history—the trajectories that I see are dangerous. They are reasons for us to keep our guard up. There’s this quote that lives in my head by Edward Murrow, “We are not descended from fearful men.” Obviously, he’s very gendered. We can look back at the history of queer and trans stuff and be like, “Oh, we were really repressed and oppressed and now we’re looking like we’re going to be again.” And that’s true. But the other thing we can look back at is be like we were fierce. We took people to task for trying to hurt us. We organized collective defense and self-defense. The fact that Stonewall was a riot is not just a quip. It is a fundamental truth about where we come from and what built our movement. There had been decades of aboveboard, polite, acquiescent, homosexual organizations, and then some people were fucking tired of it and physically fought the police. And that actually catches fire. That actually catches people’s attention. And those are the people that we come from. We come from both, and I’m not embarrassed or mad at the people who tried to make us look polite. I understand why they did it. But yeah, what we can learn from history is that we have claws. Whether we win or lose the fight is not as important as that we fight it. But we can win."