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How far would you go to have real freedom? To have true autonomy of both mind and body? The narrator of
Failure to Comply wants self-determination at all costs, and they want you to know what it did, in fact, cost them. Their story is just a little hard to convey, as they're not entirely sure where, or even when, they are.
Set in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic future, this literary sci-fi novel presents a world where humans have been unshackled from disease and their basest desires thanks to the genetic engineering and societal supervision of RSCH—an inscrutable entity with unimaginable power (including the ability to literally shape reality). In RSCH's march toward perfecting the species, however, there are "deviants" (including LGBTQ+ people and people with disabilities) who are fighting for a different vision of humanity. But where can they find hope when horror abounds, projected into their own bodies and minds by RSCH?
List of contents
- Prelude
- 1: RSCH is hiring again.
- 2: Citizenship is zero-sum.
- 3. CRIMINAL BODILY ACTIVITY.
- 4: A long white space.
- 5: Words are the current the currency.
- 6: This is the beginning of the story.
- 7: This is I, resurfaced.
- 8: Life persists.
- 9: What would become / RSCH
- 10: The Operator sewed a mouth.
- 11: The Imagination in its full glory.
- Antilude (Reya)
- 12: I grew afraid.
- 13: Time passes. From a place
- 14: Nothing was so different
- Axe 1: Above
- Axe 2: Rage Forest
- Axe 3: EX_PULSE
- Axe 4: Refuse
- Axe 5: The Scale
- 15: The citizen
About the author
Cavar is a transMad writer-about-town, author of five chapbooks, and editor-in-chief of manywor(l)ds.place. They are a PhD candidate in cultural studies and science & technology studies at the University of California, Davis, where they’re working on a dissertation about anti-psychiatry, gender anarchism, and identificatory self-determination on the internet.
You can find
Cavar teaching bicoastally, as well as in publications such as The Rumpus, Kairos, Split Lip Magazine, Electric Lit, and Disability Studies Quarterly.
Cavar lives in Davis, CA and they can often be found at their local library.
