Friends, doomers, dreamers; comrades and strangers alike… Welcome to Season 3 of Strange Exiles.
Some news… My first book has just been published! It’s called The Darkest Timeline: Living in a World with No Future, and you can buy a copy now from Revol Press, or from any of the places you buy books online.
A collection of critical essays that trace the outlines of our dystopian present and our increasingly impossible futures, my book explores apocalyptic themes in literature, film, theory and hard science in an attempt to answer the question... are we in the darkest timeline?
Today’s episode features two readings from the book. But before we get to that, I caught up with philosophical and critical heavyweight, Revol Press co-founder and friend of the pod Mike Watson. He told me all about the birth of Revol and the books they have coming out over the year to come - including Mike’s next one, Hungry Ghosts in the Machine.
This episode features extracts from two essays in my book:
Liminal Cities of the Spotless Brand
Type Zero Kardashev
Lookout for the audiobook… coming soon!
We’re Substack exclusive!
This isn’t just the very first episode of our third season, it’s also the beginning of a new era, as full episodes are now exclusive to Substack subscribers.
If you signed up on Substack with your email address, you can now listen to full episodes directly in your emails from Strange Exiles, in the Substack app, or even via Spotify by linking your account.
If you’re listening on Spotify without a linked account or through another service like Apple Podcasts, you’ll hear an extended preview of this episode lasting about 30 minutes.
Most of our listeners are already finding their way to the audio through Substack, so this just makes sense. If you don’t want to miss an episode, sign up below!
Thanks for listening. Take care of each other.
-Bram, Glasgow, June 2024
Support my work:
Explore my writing: linktr.ee/bramegieben
Pre-order my book: linktr.ee/thedarkesttimeline
Follow @strangeexiles for updates on Instagram and Twitter
More news about The Darkest Timeline:
I spoke to Jason Myles of This Is Revolution about apocalypse movies and capitalist realism - watch it here.
With Cadell Last of Philosophy Portal, I went into some of the critical theory that influenced the book, including Mark Fisher - watch it here.
I spoke to filmmaker Brett Gregory about the book’s political and social themes for Culture Matters - read or listen here.
I was also the first guest on the brand new Revol Press podcast, Theorize and be Damned. You can watch my chat with founders Mike Watson and Daniel Melo here.
I was profiled by The Book Chronicle, Sam H. Arnold’s blog about new books, and the craft of writing.
Did you know I printed up some bumper stickers? If you DM me here, via X, or on Insta, I’ll send you a couple. If you take a cool dystopian picture of them somewhere, you could win a signed copy of the book!
Episode 25: Book Launch Special - Liminal Cities