The World After Amazon is a collection of 9 short speculative stories, written by rank-and-file workers at the corporation that has transformed the way we read and so much more.

Amazon's sci-fi propaganda tells the story of a company using cutting-edge technology to deliver a utopia of cheap consumer convenience. But its workers pay the price, toiling in dystopian conditions to create a future that will exclude them. 

What happens when those workers reclaim the radical imagination and their power to tell their own stories?

The World After Amazon can be ordered in print or read or downloaded online for free, and is also available as a podcast and audiobook.

For more information, visit http://afteramazon.world.   

Book editors: Xenia Benivolksi, Max Haiven, Sarah Olutola and Graeme Webb
Narrator: Sook-Yin Lee
Editing and music: Robert Steenkamer
Illustrations: Amanda Priebe

Publisher: RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab

Read or download

The World After Amazon: Stories from Amazon Workers

Read and download

ANYBODY HOME?, by Pearl Cecil Sigur Ramsey

Life After Amazon, by Anneth Chepkoech

Relentless, by Dartagnan

Thalia In Albios, by Cory Gluck

The Iron Uprising By Ibrahim Alsahary

What can speculative fiction offer today's movements for collective liberation?
On this panel, assembled to celebrate the launch of The World After Amazon: Stories from Amazon Workers (http://afteramazon.world), four activist writing facilitators share their perspectives: Max Haiven (editor of the collection), Lola Olufemi, Phil Crockett Thomas, Sarah E. Truman, and Jamie Woodcock.

This is a recording of an event that took place on 15 September 2024 at London’s Pelican House. 

This event is presented by RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab, Red Futures and Notes from Below.

Max Haiven is a writer and teacher and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination. His most recent books are Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (2022) and Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (2020). He is editor of VAGABONDS, a series of short, radical books from Pluto Press. He teaches at Lakehead University, where he directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL).

Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and Stuart Hall Foundation researcher from London based in the Centre for Research and Education in Art and Media at the University of Westminster. Her work focuses on the uses of the political imagination and its relationship to cultural production, political demands and futurity. She is author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (Pluto Press, 2020), Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (Hajar Press, 2021) and a member of ‘bare minimum’, an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective. 

Phil Crockett Thomas writes fiction and poetry, and teaches sociology and criminology at the University of Stirling. Her research focuses on social harm, justice, and creative and collaborative methods. Her fiction has appeared in Granta and on BBC Radio 4. She is the editor of Abolition Science Fiction (2022) a collection of creative writing by activists and scholars involved in the movement for prison abolition in the U.K, and of The Moon Spins the Dead Prison (2022) with Thomas Abercromby and Rosie Roberts.

Associate Professor Sarah E. Truman is a trans-disciplinary scholar in literary education, cultural studies, and the arts, and co-director the Literary Education Lab at University of Melbourne. From 2022-2025, Dr. Truman is an ARC DECRA Fellow, their project ‘Speculative Futures’ focuses on speculative fiction as an interdisciplinary method for thinking about the world and mode of literary engagement in diverse pedagogical settings (high schools, universities, and interdisciplinary scholarship). Truman is also PI on the ARC Linkage Grant ‘Reading Climate’ (2024-2026) which focuses on the relationship between Indigenous climate fictions, literary education, and climate justice. 

Jamie Woodcock is a senior lecturer in digital economy at King’s College London. He is the author of various books, including the recent Star Wars Andor collection. He is an editor of Red Futures, Notes from Below, and Historical Materialism.

Cooperative Speculative Fiction Writing as Activism

In this inaugural episode of The Order of Unmanagable Risks we talk with artist and writer James Bridle, about the politics of algorithmic opacity, populist technologies, and new ways of seeing through capitalism’s darkness.

James' artworks have been commissioned by galleries and institutions and exhibited worldwide and on the internet. Their writing on literature, culture and networks has appeared in magazines and newspapers including Wired, the Atlantic, the New Statesman, the Guardian, and the Observer. "New Dark Age", their book about technology, knowledge, and the end of the future, was published by Verso (UK & US) in 2018, and they wrote and presented "New Ways of Seeing" for BBC Radio 4 in 2019 (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000458m). Their work can be found at http://jamesbridle.com.

The Order of Unmanagable Risks is an occasional podcast hosted by Dr. Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou and Max Haiven about capitalism, anxiety and points inbetween. It is produce by the Common Anxieties Research Project (http://anxious.community) and supported by the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL) and UCL's Institute for Advanced Study.

"The gifts of darkness?" with James Bridle (OUR001)

The ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL) is a research and creativity workshop for the radical imagination active around the world and locally in Thunder Bay, Canada.

Cooperative Speculative Fiction Writing as Activism

The ReImagining Value Action Lab

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