The World After Amazon

 

I've come across a literary project called The World After Amazon. I found it via Cory Doctorow whose book I recently reviewed, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2024/05/the-masque-of-red-death.html. It brings together thirteen employees or ex-employees of Amazon who have written short stories. In this way they can express themselves in a manner they otherwise never could. Amazon is truly the mega-corporation of mega-corporations. It dominates the retail world like no other organization in history. Like many giant corporate multinationals it often recruits the poorest people it can find and pays them the lowest wages possible. Because of this, I was not surprised to find that all the stories have a futuristic dystopian setting and rather grim themes such as societal collapse, anti-humanism, cyberpunk technocracy and ecocide. As always, futuristic fiction describes the present more than it predicts the actual future. Some of the authors are anonymous, presumably because they might face repercussions at work as a result of their involvement in the project which has an irreverent policy towards Amazon, to say the least. All the entries in the anthology are worth reading, but I think the best by far is Thalia in Albios by Cory Gluck. It is about a young woman called Thalia who lives in a post-apocalyptic city which consists of shanty towns of poverty in which there are little pockets of opulence, gated communities where the wealthy live in seclusion. Thalia works as a maid for one of the rich households and her employer is an older woman called Linda who lives in a mansion with her family. She is a very two-faced person who treats Thalia either with kindness or cruelty dispending on her mood. Sometimes she reprimands Thalia for damages and messes caused by her children that are not Thalia's fault. This story, and some of the others, are very revealing about what it is like to be a low status citizen in a harsh and conformist world; something that really spoke to my heart, being a former hospital porter. (Have I mentioned that before? Maybe once or twice perhaps.) The anthology is available as a free ebook or audio-book, see: https://afteramazon.world. However, you can buy a paperback copy if you prefer. Ironically, this can also be purchased on Amazon.
See here for more background: https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2023/12/leave-world-behind-review.html.
And: https://hpanwo-bb.blogspot.com/2024/05/everything-for-everyone-piw-in-fiction.html.
And: https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2024/02/doomsday-bunkers.html.