The Virus Diaries: Travels in Alterrealities

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On 16 July 3580 Franz Nelson Moebius, lead scientist of the Gaia III mission on Earth, records a long message on the central database of Mars's Armageddon Colony, where humanity had to relocate when earth was declared unliveable. His message includes a selection of fragments from the 'Virocene': the long epoch humanity and earth entered when COVID-19 was declared a pandemic - one of the many viral onsets that would lead to the human species' relocation to Mars. Lost to plundering, political airbrushing and misplaced activism, the archives of the Virocene are now a strange hybrid of science fiction screenplays, distorted history and records of political espionage previously stored in Langley, London, the metropolitan headquarters of a network of Chinese colonies. Among them, Franz finds the Chronicles of the 'Daisy Rainbow Knights Order', a small anarchist cell comprised of Melissa Dreary, PVJB, SKA and TCE, which believes in a society free of the inequality sustained by authoritarianism and climate change. Its work on the invention of a master vaccine that will free humanity of hatred and illness is plotted in the context of progressive human rights repression and environmental pollution. Willing to risk everything, the cell's members decide to release their vaccine on the rift created between this world and the world of ancestral spirits, where, centuries into the Virocene, the government eliminated black populations protesting against inequality. However, the road to recovery and reconciliation proves as difficult as a coherent reading of the surviving records of the cosmogonic event that the Daisy Rainbow Knights Order set in motion with their actions: the 'Commemoration Troubles' of SARS-26-Covid 3004.The Virus Diaries unfolds as a collection of different stories that converge behind the idea of a social and environmental crisis, as this is narrated by several voices across millennia in the Virocene. Its central plot, which borrows from cinematic and discursive renditions of magical realism, science fiction and memory studies, forms an allegory of real problems that humanity and our planet face today.

Worldmakings: A Book of Blogs

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The present book includes a collection of essays organised into four thematic clusters that converge behind a single conceptual umbrella: that of worldmaking. Philosophical in its origins, ‘worldmaking’ refers to both cognitive and practical acts that organise the physical and social environments we inhabit. Section one (Gendered Worldmakings: Interplays of Culture with Politics) considers the behaviour and actions of some political leaders and former politicians, who tend to adopt gendered styles in the discharge of their duties or the choices they make, with various consequences of international or cultural significance. Section two (Small Acts with Grave Consequences) does something similar, but selects incidents whose protagonists are not celebrities but common citizens who react to particular pressures. Section three (Markets and Intersectional Worldmakings) considers the worldmaking power of international markets, especially with regards to their ability to trap or liberate human subjects from structures of inequality. The last section (Worldmakings and Sustainability) interrogates the ways organisations and state institutions act to create or sometimes unintentionally destroy liveable environments for world societies.