The Distributive Passions

fiction

Fragments from “The Distributive Passions”

June 28, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] The Distributive Passions is a fiction project that I’ve worked on from time to time, mostly as a way to explore problems in my study of anarchist history and theory in a novel context. These are simply fragments from the notebooks, which give some idea of the world in which the episodes are set. From “The Distributive Passions” (more fragments) [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] Gabriel Solly leads a quiet life in the tiny community of New Earth, Oregon Territories (Universal Code Union, Owenite-Orthodox), laboring in the Archives of the New Earth Institute, marking time […]
Contr'un

On Enewetak (from The Distributive Passions)

May 15, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
This immediately follows the section I posted May 2. It originally appeared on the defunct Distributive Passions blog. Bradford Peck was the author of The World A Department Store, and prime mover, along with the Vroomans, in the cooperative movement in New England. Much of this has already taken another shape in the rewriting, but I was reminded of this version by Charles Johnson’s comments on the different ways of envisioning markets. The contrasting visions have certainly been around for a long time… The Canteen It’s more like a swap meet than a food stand or restaurant, with a menu […]
fiction

From “The Distributive Passions”

May 2, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
The Distributive Passions, my fiction project, will return in The Mutualist #2 — “Owning Up,” but, for now, I’m going to leave KAli to fend for herself in the far future, and get back to Gabriel Solly and more contemporary concerns. Gabe’s world is my idea-workshop, the place I go when I need to work out the practical implications of theoretical concerns. It’s a world where lots of little things went differently than they have in our own—and many things worked out in very much the same ways. Fourier ended up with the prominence of Marx—and vice versa. Agassiz was […]
Uncategorized

My NaNoWriMo

December 3, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
Well, I’ll admit with no regrets that I did not complete the 50,000 words of fiction necessary to “win” during November’s National Novel Writing Month. Some other realities intervened. I wrote a little over 25,000 words on The Distributive Passions, some of which is up on the site. (I may have covered the other half in other writings.) Winner or not, I had a very good time trying, and the pressure of trying to get ready for a month of sustained writing did wonders for my overall sense of where the novel is going. I did manage to write a […]
Uncategorized

Fools rush in

September 25, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur
As some of you know, I’ve been playing with an alternate-history project for awhile. The Distributive Passions is “Fourierist speculative fiction, with a mutualist message,” or something like that. I’m treating it as a place to make speculations about the implications and possibilities of the socialist and libertarian histories which occupy so much of my scholarly time, and to make some broader, less scholarly statements about people, how they interact, and what happens when they try to change the world. Having worked on various outlines and character descriptions, and having found it hard to keep it all straight in my […]