Thoughts on MILITARY COLLECTIVISM IN THE SECOND PHASE by B.R. Sokolov (DRAFT) – 28/11/1989 Dr. Clarisse Martin-Stucker Salome Blucher University of St. Bernhard, Department of Ideological Study PREFACE In offering this commentary on the latest ideological work from the Central Party School, it is the aim of the authors to offer helpful and constructive insight... Continue Reading →
CANTONESE ELECTRIC GODS
When she was a girl San-min saw her father explode. It was the moment he kissed the neon. A shower of sparks – flames all across the corrugated rooftops of the urban village. Old Cantonese walls, alleyways where girls waited for business, roads clogged with tangled-together bicycles, networks of the rubber tendrils of the power... Continue Reading →
SHORT FICTION – SUNKISSER
They had taken a human prisoner, which at once Vya was interested in, too interested in, she knew, perversely so, everyone else knew, but there was no helping it, for long ago she had devoted herself to the Almighty Vhod, who had decreed that knowledge was the first objective, and so it was, wasn’t it,... Continue Reading →
Lady Crow – or, a demon in the heart of Hong Kong
Everyone in the community knew there was something wrong with the Chan woman. Nobody could quite name what it was – oh, she had a nice husband, didn’t she, that young woman? Didn’t they get on well, those two? He, Lung Ka-ming, worked at a marketing firm, the community understood, and brought in good money,... Continue Reading →
THE GHOST OF TSINTAU
It is half past seven in the evening, Nanking time, and Captain Hans von Kaulbach stands near the stern of the SMS Lettow-Vorbeck, surveying the dismal fog that wreathes the Bay of Tsintau, his arms stiff behind his back and a cigarette between his teeth. The ship sits uneasily, a grey silhouette as calm as... Continue Reading →
I CAN’T HOLD YOU WITH THESE MONSTROUS HANDS PT. 2
In a field in British Colombia, in the shadow of a snow-capped mountain in the rain, I saw a walker brigade mourn their dead. It was the Honoured 25th, a formation mostly composed of Russians and Euros, sixty-percent or so, with a Central Asian infantry regiment and a support team of mixed Sino-Viets and Indians.... Continue Reading →
HEIMAT; OR, LAMENT OF THE DRIFTING PANZERS
The gun was ready. Eastern Galicia, June 1963 – position A43VSS, within the woods near a cresting length of the Bug, blasted earth and soil, barbed wire and concrete. Through thick fog the rumble of Soviet tank engines echoing across the plains like the calls of monsters from times gone by, patrols stalking the invisible... Continue Reading →
I CAN’T HOLD YOU WITH THESE MONSTROUS HANDS PT. 1
“Ah! I remember the spring after the first year of the war, when the Eurasians had settled down to rest and rearm after the dreadful battles around Beaver Creek, and the snow upon which they and the Americans had bloodied one another thawed, revealing bloated trails of corpses all across western Alaska. A time of... Continue Reading →
THE FIRST WAR
I tried as hard as I could to save them. You understand, that was the urge they’d given me – they had filled me with the right kind of chemicals and given me the meat to match, and told me to go out and bring our lads back alive. So that was what I did.... Continue Reading →
The Cult of the Patchwork – Chinese Modernity (1978-2012) and the Holy Roman Empire
What was so great, exactly, about China before Xi Jinping? We live in an era of widespread political nostalgia, from misplaced American or British fantasies about the civilised, sensible pre-Trump or Brexit eras, to the nationalist dreams of pre-immigration pristine nationhood of the European pseudo-fascists. Cosplay politicians, dressed as past successes, seek to square fleeting,... Continue Reading →