Our first segment focuses on the history of socialism and science fiction (SF) in the early to mid-20th century United States, in particular the novels of George Allan England and the Popular Front SF of the Michelists in the 1930s and 1940s. Our second segment discusses the efforts of organizers in the Carbondale Assembly for Radical Equity (CARE) to help trans and queer persons — targeted by the recent wave of oppressive legislation in states like Florida, Texas, and elsewhere — relocate to the relative safety of Carbondale, Illinois. 

Guests in this episode:

• Sean Cashbaugh, a postdoctoral lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program and author of  “A Paradoxical, Discrepant, and Mutant Marxism: The Emergence of Radical Science Fiction in the American Popular Front,” in the Journal for the Study of Radicalism.

• Cassandra Coffey, “a forty-year-old transfeminine nonbinary anarcho-communist redneck from Kentucky who has spent the past several years involved in queer liberation action and grassroots organization for causes that promote equity, emancipation, and challenge unjust authority.”

• Joe Shapiro, associate professor of English literature at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale and author of The Illiberal Imagination: Class and the Rise of the U.S. Novel (University of Virginia Press, 2017).

• Mattie Stearns, “a nonbinary libertarian socialist J20 defendant, organizing in Carbondale for about ten years, and life-long resident of Carbondale. They are going to school to become a venture socialist. They are a general trouble-maker.” 

You can reach out to CARE at [email protected] or by messaging the CARE Facebook page. You can donate to CARE by making a donation on the Carbondale Rainbow Cafe website and writing “CARE” in the memo box. Or you can send a check by mail to Rainbow Cafe, 118 N. Illinois Avenue, Carbondale, IL 62901, and write “CARE” in the memo line. 

This episode’s opening reading is “Cogita’s Plan,” from the “Stink Ape Resurrection Primer” forthcoming in Locust Review 10. Music featured in this episode includes Melissa Carper, Mike Watt and the Secondmissingmen, and Omnia Sol.

Locust Radio is a project of the Locust Arts and Letters Collective. It is hosted by Tish Turl, Laura Fair-Schulz, and Adam Turl. It is produced by Alexander Billet, Omnia Sol, and Adam Turl.