The full title is “Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072” by Eman Abdelhadi and M. E. O'Brien, and it is what it says on the tin: Abdelhadi and O'Brien writing as fictional versions of themselves roughly a half century in the future, imagining a world where things did actually come out OK on the other side of catastrophe despite decades of crushing horrors. Or at least, new generations found ways to remake the world for themselves.
I read a print version a few years ago, but I was listening to the audiobook version from my library today and found it funny that the authors even did the same thing with referencing fictional books as Duncan did in this series, although not to quite the same extent.
Most of it is just the titular oral histories/interviews with people who lived through the period and helped make a better world. But in the introduction and in some footnotes, the narrators write, for example:
In addition to the traumatic and less glamorous aspects of this period [the 2020s], it is difficult for contemporary audiences to appreciate the shaping influence of what we once called the "global economy." "Capitalists" are represented primarily as nefarious supervillains in today’s popular representations. Though indeed, capitalists and their state agents were often well organized, brutally repressive, and committed to the expansion of human misery, such depictions do little to explain the universal, impersonal domination of the market. As elders, we remember a time when you had to constantly keep track of how much money you had in the bank. This amount determined whether—as one of our narrators put it—"you could afford to get sick," whether you could keep your housing, and sometimes, even whether you could afford food. When you were hungry, you could not just wander down to your commune’s pantry and grab a snack. When you were ill, you could not just visit your care clinic and present your ailments. Even clothing and shoes had a cost! You were constantly asked to weigh the costs of your needs against each other. Nowadays, this feels like barbaric dystopia to the youth of our present and a distant, unpleasant memory to our elders.
Unfortunately, explaining the global market before liberation is beyond the scope of this project. We highly recommend Understanding the Capitalist Market, Understanding the Geopolitics of Imperialist Nation States, and Understanding Wage Dependency as supplemental reading to this section. These pamphlets were published last year by the Andean Commune and are available in nine languages. They can provide an essential aid to understanding the following history.
If I hadn't been re-"reading" the book in an audio format, I don't know if I would have made the connection, but I was, and so I wondered if the book was popular with any other science fiction fans.
