Torque Control

Chisom Umeh in Conversation with Adedapo Adeniyi

Adedapo Adeniyi (also goes by Dapo The Abstract) is a Nigerian artist working in literature, film and photography, music (DJ) as well as art curation and counterculture archiving. He expresses his art through abstract avant-garde sensibilities. His debut novel, Wanderer, is available in stores.

Dapo holding his novel, Wanderer

Chisom Umeh is a Nigerian fiction writer and poet. His short stories have been featured in Omenana, Apex, Clarkesworld, Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2023, African Ghosts anthology, Isele, Mythaxis, Scifi Shorts, and elsewhere. His short story, “Ancestor’s Gift”, won the 2024 Tractor Beam short story contest. He was a finalist for the Seattle Worldcon Short Story Contest and is the winner of the 2025 Nommo Award for Best African Speculative Fiction Short Story.

Chisom, holding a copy of the Wanderer. Image: African Imaginary

Chisom: Hey Dapo.

Nice to have you do the interview.

I finished reading your novel Wanderer a couple of days ago, and I must say, the journey feels like one long dream. It’s a steady flow of alternating sentences and logic that sometimes contradict each other and yet, strangely enough, feels complete and cohesive. Can you tell me how you were able to keep the story you were trying to tell in focus, even while spinning such a wild tale?

Dapo: Thank you, Chisom. I’m excited to have this interview with you.

I want to start by saying the story mostly wrote itself; I was just a conduit. Most of this book was written in an automatist, stream-of-consciousness style. They were retellings of dreams, memories, and reality, and I wanted them to appear that way. I never lost sight of the story because I welcomed getting lost as I was writing it to find myself.

Chisom: Oh, that’s pretty interesting. To me, the novel reads like Amos Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard crossed with Vajra Chandrasekera’s luminous prose. It definitely felt like older hands were guiding yours on the page. Were there literary influences you were channeling when writing the book?

Dapo: Yeah, I mean, I try to stay away from direct influences while I’m writing, and I didn’t read The Palmwine Drinkard until after I wrote Wanderer. I took influences more from films and cinematic sensibilities than literary, but in that regard, Borges, Philip K. Dick, Timothy Leary, André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, Aldous Huxley’s The Doors Of Perception, and my editor and friend, Manuel Marrero. I think these are the ones I can remember right now, plus I don’t want to go overboard. But these people and their works across surrealism, psychedelia, paranoid fiction, sci-fi, metafiction, and so on influenced me in many ways and were formative for how I approached writing and this book.

Chisom: It’s interesting that you mentioned Surrealist Manifesto, psychedelia, and paranoid fiction, because in an essay in Medium titled Abstractism Manifesto, you talked about how ‘abstractism’ is a term that subsumes all of these concepts and more. I like the way you explained it in the essay and how it relates to your work. But could you do a quick description of the term (abstractism) so we could understand it in relation to your work?

Dapo: Absolutely! So when I wrote the Abstractism Manifesto in early 2023, I defined it as being an amalgamation of solipsism, surrealism, psychedelia, subjective reality, and the physics of psychosis. I believe abstractism brings these concepts together to take reality and the world around us from a state of form to an abstract sensory state of formlessness, and that’s what I try to do with my work — the dissolution of some absolute real into an abstract cosmic real.

Chisom: In your experience as a filmmaker, what is the major difference between visual storytelling and written one? Do you prefer one medium over the other?

Dapo: I mean, writing is definitely cheaper. Making films is more expensive and taxing. I also think it’ll kill me faster so that might be why right now it excites me more than writing does. But, frankly, the major difference is the painting. With words, I’m guiding the readers’ imagination. At the end of the day, everyone will come out of it with different images. But with film, I have to literally represent those images on the screen. I’m doing the painting for the audience, they just have to watch and engage.

Chisom: Besides making movies, I know that you do some DJ work on the side. You had a collaboration with NTS, which is really great. How did that happen?

Dapo: Let me put it in context: I work with this new-age collective called Freewater, which was founded by my friends. I serve as its curator and co-director. Freewater secured a residency with NTS Radio, and since I also DJ, they featured one of my mixes as part of the collective. We’re having an underground, new wave music festival/concert on the 11th of December (I think the interview will be out after it?), and NTS is our major partner.

Chisom: That’s incredible, actually. So, does your music influence your writing in any way? Some writers like to curate playlists for particular writing projects. Something they listen to just to put themselves in the mood. Are you that kind of writer?

Dapo: Music definitely plays a huge part in my process. When I was writing Wanderer, all I listened to was shoegaze. I found a shoegaze playlist that had over a hundred songs and it was all I listened to while I slept and dreamt and while I wrote as well. I’ve been DJing for almost 2 years now, and it’s made me understand music as well as how different people interact with it. There are sensibilities of transience I borrowed from writing and translated to how I DJ.

Chisom: I kept wondering about the shoegaze reference when I was reading the book. Something told me there was more to it than just being an element in the story, and I’m glad you just confirmed that. Which brings me to your process with writing your stories and how you edit them. Do you edit while writing or after?

Dapo: Oh yeah, shoegaze has a very dreamlike, haze-inducing feeling and I wanted the book to feel like that. I do very minimal editing while writing. I finished the entire thing then read it over a couple of times before sending it to my editor, and we had this period of sending drafts back and forth and conversations on the subject matter.

But enough about me, I want to hear what type of music you listen to and how editing works for you. I mean, you just won the Nommo, haha.

Chisom: Oh, lol.

Well, I’m very mundane with my music. I don’t have any playlists or do any sort of curation. In fact, when I’m writing, I wouldn’t want to hear any music at all as it easily interferes with my thought processes and breaks my stream-of-consciousness, AKA “flow”. But when I do listen to music, outside writing, it’s very Davido and Asake and Victony, and whatever Dlala Thukzin just released. For edits, I can’t move forward with writing if I feel like there’s something wrong with a previous sentence. So I tinker with that till it feels fine to me. So we’re maybe kind of opposites on this.

Dapo: Correct me if I’m wrong but you seem like a very calculated writer. You’re delicate about detail, you’re careful. I think it’s beautiful. I wish I could be that type of writer. Like I said before (this may sound a little pretentious but I fully believe it), I don’t really do any writing, these things write themselves and use me as a conduit. I don’t know where they come from or where they are going or why; they come raw and I write in real time. My flow can be erratic most times.

Chisom: I like to think I have an eye for detail, but, trust me, I’m not really that meticulous. I know writers who would draw up elaborate plots that cover the first scene to the last, and fill up a board with sticky notes. Me? I mostly just sit down and write a story as it comes into my head. I think both our approaches are valid, so long as the outcome is something folks can read and enjoy. When I’m done writing and send the work out, that’s where my effort ends. But I’ve seen you go through hell and high water to publicize your book. And it has really paid off. Maybe that’s something you’d teach me someday?

Nardwuar holding a copy of Dapo’s first novel, Wanderer

Dapo: You’re amazing, so we’re kin.

Thank you, I think it’s been a learning curve. A lot of how this book has been handled is experimental, constantly trying to see how to reinvent whatever a rollout is supposed to be. Some days before the book came out I’d post videos of just my legs as I was walking around. Wandering, if you will. I made cards and handed out googly eyes. I’ve had readings and talks. I even had an abstractism lecture and played a psychedelic techno set. I keep thinking of ways to present a work of literature outside of just the confines of literature, especially as a multimedia artist. I look forward to reinterpreting the book and presenting it in so many other formats: photograph, sound, installation, you name it.

Chisom: Say I wanted to try my hand at writing abstractism, are you holding one of those lectures anytime soon?

Dapo: Hopefully sometime early next year. I’m working on writing another edition of the manifesto that’s more professional, but I think that through reading the manifesto that’s up right now, as well as Wanderer and some of my short stories, anyone could get the gist of what abstractism is.

What’s next for you now Chisom? In the world of African Speculative Fiction.

Chisom: For me, I’m also trying to piece together a collection of short stories that hopefully might be my debut in the book-publishing space. I want most of the stories in the collection to be centered around two themes, so that means I’m writing mostly new stories.

Anyway, it’s really been wonderful having this chat with you. I’m looking forward to reading more of your stuff in the future.

Dapo: Sending you love and the best of wishes Chisom, excited to see your collection. I’ll send you mine as it comes along. You’re a refreshing voice in the scene here.

Wanderer, cover art

Ruminations on Place, Fantasy, and Nkereuwem Albert’s The Bone River

“I wanted to capture the essence of the place.” 

Nkereuwem Albert

A review by Jesutomisin Ipinmoye

The Bone River by Nkereuwem Albert is an urban fantasy published by Phoenix, an imprint of Ouida Books focused on Science Fiction and Fantasy stories. 

There are many things to love about The Bone River.

There is the magic system, the sense of a thick and present world bubbling away beneath the fabric of our own world. In Nkereuwem’s Calabar, miracles are the work of Pastors contorting magic in front of a blind congregation, and penises can, in fact, be stolen. By virtue of your initiation and belonging to one of four houses, you become a conduit to magic and mystery seeping out of the earth. You can command the dead, kindle fire from within you, and form familiars out of bone. You can shape it into beasts and seal gods. It is a land of infinite possibility. If you’re creative enough, you can conjure magic in service of peace—or to deceive.

This brings me to the story itself. By the time you put down Nkereuwem’s The Bone River, you would have witnessed how fragile peace can be, while war remains a latent possibility. This in itself should not be a discovery. We are well familiar with the flexibility of politicised narratives, the speculative reality of a truth wielded by authority. Surely, it should not take too much imagination to condense the abstraction of the lie beneath Calabar’s secret peace into a manner of critique about the cities we inhabit or the stories we tell about the blood that soaks our collective memories. After all, there is even greater violence than a certain bastard’s deception that is used every day as a tool to maintain a semblance of “status quo,” a peace with which no one is comfortable. And yet, the discovery of deception, as you read, grabs you. You know things like this happen, and yet, you are shocked. Why wouldn’t you be? It is the job of good fantasy to re-expose us to reality afresh. When you have seen and seen and seen with all your seeing eyes, the world unseen can and should shock you in new ways. 

And then there is a stressful sapphic romance.

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Policing perception: weird fiction, Tony Benn, and the warped borders of the real

by Philip A. Suggars

There’s a moment in the Wachowski’s seminal 1999 movie the Matrix where Keanu Reeves’s elegantly blank Neo sees the same black cat walk past a doorway twice. In the movie, such moments are signals that the nefarious Agents are about to emerge into Neo’s simulated reality and give him the mother of all cardio workouts.

But what if something similar were to happen to you?

Perhaps you have a similar moment of déjà vu, notice that roses now seem to smell like freesias or that the sky suddenly looks a bit purple. Everyone you tell about this discovery, however, insists that everything is the “same as it ever was” (in the words of the old song). Roses smell as sweet as they ever did. The sky is the same old blue.

After a while you might accept that it’s your perception that is at fault, shrug a little, and decide to get on with the gardening. But at the back of your mind there might be a nagging doubt. Perhaps you were never supposed to notice the difference.

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Cultivated Meat: Science Fact and Fiction

By James Henstock

 Cultivated (lab-grown) meat has emerged from science fiction into a genuine commercial product. The promise of sustainable, animal-free meat has captured the interest of governments concerned with national food security in a time of rapid and unpredictable climate change. Supported by a rapidly developing $3Bn industry, cultivated meat is now available for limited public consumption.

However, public opinion on cultivated meat is strongly polarised. Since most people haven’t yet tried cultivated meat, preconceptions have instead been formed by its depictions in science fiction which may be either inspiringly utopian or more commonly, starkly dystopian. Real culture-grown products are being introduced to a consumer base with expectations based on imagined realities. 

In this article I will introduce some of the technology that underpins the production of cultivated meat, and how its origins in the biopharmaceutical industry present both opportunities and challenges for manufacturing appetising food. How far does the reality of cultivated meat match the science fiction representation? Can scientists and storytellers work together towards a shared utopian vision of this Future Food?

A new era: the Post-burger 

On Monday 5th August 2013, Dutch pharmacologist Mark Post unveiled the world’s first cultivated beef burger at a press conference in London, thus launching a new era in food. The burger was cooked and eaten, and whilst being described as ‘close to meat, but not as juicy’ and costing around $325,000 nevertheless inspired a boom in investment that saw the creation of over a hundred start-ups and university spin outs, plus a handful of very well-capitalized companies in the USA, Israel, Australia, and the Netherlands (Mead, 2013; Gregory-Manning & Post, 2024). Since 2013 it is widely estimated that over $3.1 billion has been invested into cultivated meat enterprises, with a peak in 2021 (GFI, 2023). New consumer markets are opening up following regulatory approvals in Singapore, China, Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Israel and the UK as governments recognise the value of a diversified ‘Alternative Proteins’ ecosystem in enhancing food security in response to growing population challenges and climate change. 

Yet the concept of ‘synthetic’ meat has been in the public consciousness for generations. Since first being articulated in fiction in 1897 (as a gift from the Martians in Two Planets by Kurd Lasswitz), social and technological revolutions have triggered particular bursts of literary creativity in the 1930s, 1950’s and 1960s, corresponding to increasingly mechanised intensive farming practices and the overall boom of technological progress in the 20th century, not least of which was in biomedicine and laboratory cell culture. In a 1931 essay on the future of science, Winston Churchill wrote:

‘We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium. Nor need the pleasures of the table be banished. That gloomy Utopia of tabloid meals need never be invaded. The new foods will from the outset be practically indistinguishable from the natural products, and any changes will be so gradual as to escape observation.’ 

Churchill’s predictions and the early optimism of fin de siècle authors in humankind’s salvation through science are admittedly taking some time to realise, yet the technology required to bring cultivated meat to fruition is being developed at pace. 

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Energy Economies in Science Fiction

By Jo Lindsay Walton

‘Embers’: Stranded Assets

Wole Talabi’s short story ‘Embers’ (2024) explores the potential consequences of energy transition for a rural community in Nigeria, focusing on one oil worker who cannot let go of dreams of petrochemical prosperity. 

Kawashida fuel cells were invented by a team of scientists at the ShinChi Technology Company of Japan […] By using a proprietary genetic modification technique to rewire the metabolism of a heterotrophic bacterial strain, making it autotrophic, and then further splicing the synthetic microbe with a cocktail of high cell density, rapid reproduction genes, Dr. Haruko Kawashida and her team created a living, breathing, renewable supply of energy for the planet. The synthetic autotroph used concentrated sunlight to efficiently consume carbon dioxide and exchange electrons, creating a steady stream of electricity.1

How convenient! And as if its abundant, net carbon-negative energy weren’t enough, Kawashida cell technology also revolutionizes wastewater treatment. It’s a near-perfect deus ex machina for the climate crisis. 

But not everyone is happy. When Kawashida decimates the oil industry, Uduak is abruptly cut off from his sponsored scholarship. Cast adrift, Uduak becomes a kind of inverted solarpunk protagonist—he uses grit and ingenuity not to jury-rig funky green utopiatech, but rather to attempt to revive the village’s derelict oil refinery. Even though clean energy is widely available, Uduak argues that the village’s real needs remain unmet, and he remains hostile to the post-carbon vision laid out by his idealistic rival, Affiong.

The story comes to a grisly and tragic conclusion—murder, arson, suicide. Without excusing Uduak’s rather OTT response, we can see that there is a clear lack of compassion to support him transition to the era of a stabilised climate. One wonders if Uduak might also have a point: will the village as a whole be left behind by government, industry and civil society? Just as Uduak was left behind by the village?

Uduak becomes what is sometimes called a ‘stranded asset,’ something once valuable, whose value has vanished because of a probably permanent shift in its circumstances. The story’s core tension—between his thwarted social mobility and the new sustainable technology—reflects the current dilemma of green transition for petro-states like Nigeria. 

It also implies broader questions about energy transitions. Within science fiction, transformation of the energy system often forms the hard-to-imagine bridge between the dystopian present and the ambiguously utopian future. There are the dilithium crystals and warp cores in Star Trek, there is the Grid in Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels. But the questions which arise are not just about what energy will power the future. They are also about how societies will allocate and manage such energy.  Could energy itself somehow be the foundation of a just and equitable economy? If the flow of energy were to directly underpin the flow of money, could this support systems that are more cooperative, collective, and liberated, and less exploitative? Systems that are not just energy-based, but also just based pure and simple?

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Review: Delicious in Dungeon (2024)

By Marta F. Suarez

Dine or Die, with a Pinch of Comedy

Delicious in Dungeon (2024, Netflix). Season 1, Episode 3. Living-Armour Stir Fry and Soup [00:18:57]

Delicious in Dungeon (Netflix, 2024-present) is Studio Trigger’s adaptation of Ryōko Kui’s eponymous manga (2014-2023). The series is set in a fantasy world that merges and echoes different fantasy and manga traditions popular in Japan. The overall setting takes the viewer to the dungeon crawl genre, which recently experienced a resurgence in the country after Etrian Odyssey Nexus (2018). The characters’ races and skills are shaped by influences of Dungeons and Dragons, the Middle-Earth world set by Tolkien, and even the Final Fantasy universe, which itself draws inspiration from these narrative traditions. However, what makes Delicious in Dungeon significantly different is the resonances of cooking series like Mister Ajikko (1986-1989), a manga series that had several sequel runs over the years, including a recent 2015-2019 one, titled Mister Ajikko Bakumatsu-hen. The first season comprises 24 episodes, with a new second season coming soon this 2025. 

In the world of the story, adventuring parties enter dungeons looking for the legendary Golden Country, a kingdom transported by a sorcerer to the depths of an expansive dungeon, which is said to contain the ultimate treasures. Lured by wealth, fame, and adventure, different guilds enter this dungeon with the hope of finding the lost realm. One of these teams is led by Laios Touden, a tall-man (human) Paladin Knight who starts this quest alongside his sister Falin, a magic wielder; Marcille, a half-elf mage; and Chilchuck, a halfling thief. The opening scenes present the party’s encounter with a magnificent red dragon, against which they are losing. As the beast defeats them one by one, Falin uses her last strength before being ingested by the dragon to teleport the other members of the party out of the dungeon. Still alive but on the surface, the party is now several floors above where the battle took place and too far to attempt to rescue Falin. However, due to the magic of the dungeon, Falin could be resurrected if there are some remains and she has not been fully digested. With this in mind, the group decides to return, defeat the dragon and rescue any remaining parts of Falin. However, with time being of the essence, they realise that they cannot afford to stop to resupply and find provisions, as that would risk their chance to succeed. In a conventional dungeon crawl storytelling, the party would possibly open containers to find cheese and fruit, pick edible mushrooms and seeds, or perhaps kill a rodent and eat a left-behind spoiled pie in a moment of necessity. In contrast, Laios introduces the unconventional idea of eating the monsters they encounter, setting the course for the series. With this decision, the party ensures their survival and the journey becomes also one of gastronomic exploration.

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Torque Control 301

By Phoenix Alexander

The organism is relentless

Calorie demanding, perpetually in need of hydration, oxygen, and a cocktail of other vitamins and minerals, requiring 4-8 hours sleep a night to repair itself from the ravages of the day, day after day. A lifetime’s worth of consumption. 

This unkind—some might say anti humanist—characterization is famously articulated by the nefarious Agent Smith in The Matrix, where he attempts to psychologically break a human rebel leader, Morpheus, by telling him: 

Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. (The Wachowskis, 1999)

The accusation, while effective for cinema, is not quite true. Smith implies that this “consumption” is a species-specific act, and not one located within a complex and interrelated ecosystem of both human and non-human life. If anything, plants should be the focus of his anger: they are the enablers of this “surviving,” this “spreading,” being masterful spreaders and survivors themselves. More radically: even drawing the lines between species may be a spurious rhetorical move. “A leaf is the only thing in our known world that can manufacture sugar out of materials—light and air—that have never been alive,” Zoë Schlanger reminds us in her recent book The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth (Schlanger, 2024). “All the rest of us are secondary users, recycling the stuff the plant has made… Think about it: every animal organ was built with sugar from plants” (Schlanger, 2024, pp. 27-28). Her (admittedly simplified) description is useful in exculpating the human organism specifically from the charge of excessive consumption. It is not our fault; we are enabled, built literally by component organisms and their byproducts, both visible and invisible. 

Nevertheless, the human body and its source/s of sustenance tends to take on the nature of a problem to be solved in many science fictional narratives. From the replicators of Star Trek to the hideous ‘pigoons’ of Margaret Atwood’s Mad Addam series to the equally hideous ‘sligs’ of Frank Herbert’s Dune universe to the more mundane efforts of potato-growing in Andy Weir’s The Martian, authors and film-makers offer the gamut of appealing to radically unethical means of keeping the human organism alive in conditions that, even without the lack of food, threaten to kill it. (I am reminded here of the opening crawl to the movie Gravity: “Life in space is impossible”) (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013). 

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Eternally Displaced Persons? Territorial Bodies and The Ministry of Time

By Matt Finch

Introduction

What does travel through time and space reveal about the body?

This essay is an invitation to think about bodies moving through time in a work of contemporary literature. What is exposed about a body when it is displaced in time and space? The concept of the territorial body, developed from the pioneering work of Verónica Gago (2020), serves as a lens through which we can understand “the body of the individual person in the context of its entanglement with questions of territory, incorporating the complex multidirectional dynamics which arise between the individual body, the collective, and the various territories they inhabit” (Finch and Mahon, 2025, p.163). I also consider the temporal dimension of how “institutionally and culturally enforced rhythms, or timings, shape flesh into legible, acceptable embodiment” (Freeman, 2010, p.40). In this framing, the body is always the body in context and contexts, in turn, are changed by the bodies which populate them.

This lens is trained, here, on Kaliane Bradley’s 2024 novel The Ministry of Time. Bradley uses a science fiction conceit to bring together bodies from the territories of Britain’s past, present, and future. They populate a narrative which is at once a romance with sophisticated queer dynamics, a techno-thriller, an “odd couple” comedy of cultural misunderstanding, and a meditation on race and national identity in the era of climate crisis.

Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time (Hodder and Stoughton, 2024)

The novel also provides the perfect opportunity for us to move Gago’s concept beyond the limits of “real world” plausibility; as one of Bradley’s characters puts it, “we are interested in the actual feasibility of taking a human body through time. Our concern is if the process of time-travel has major implications for the expat or the expat’s surroundings.” (p.37). From Bradley’s science-fictional vantage points, distinct interrogations of the territorial body can be made.

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Futures Imperfect

Paul Graham Raven

Column/Vector “Community” Special Issue 300

The longer I’ve sat with the assignment to write a column themed on community, the more daunting it has come to seem. This is, ironically, a personal problem: put very simply—and thus avoiding autobiographical sidequests—community is not something with which I am very well acquainted, and what acquaintance I have with it is tainted with distrust. Community has always shown itself to me as being concerned with who’s out as much as who’s in, if not perhaps more so; I thus tend to position community, from which one may be expelled, in contrast to the admittedly more abstract notion of society, of which one is a member by default (though one may of course be an unwilling and/or disenfranchised member of society).

Those who work with language face a perpetual dilemma in what we sometimes still call the ‘information age ’: on the one hand, words have meanings; on the other hand, meanings change with usage, and this process of semantic alteration (or evacuation) seems only to accelerate. In this particular case, I am rather stuck with “community,” but I can surface my discontent by suggesting a fresh distinction between community considered as a noun—a thing which one has or does not have—and community as a verb—a thing which one does, or in which one partakes.

(Readers who detect a Heraclitean distinction between being and becoming, respectively, are not imagining things; those whose philosophy tends more to the vernacular may prefer to think in terms of product and process.)

To be clear, I’m not out to position one or the other of these terms as being “the bad community;” indeed, that’s exactly the sort of monochromatic thinking that I’m trying to get away from in this piece. But I do want to highlight the way in which community-as-noun tends ineluctibly toward in-group-out-group dynamics, while community-as-verb puts the focus instead upon choices and compromises made in the face of constraints whose very commonality might conjure up the spectre of society which Margaret Thatcher once so successfully banished. More plainly, it seems to me that by paying more attention to what we are obliged to do, in the process of making, unmaking and remaking community through our actions, we might better recognise the greater societal ideal that community reproduces at a smaller and more limited scale.

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