Satire as the world dies
Bunker Dispatch
The light bulb from your porch is shattered; broken glass shards on your welcome mat—front door wide open, and you smell gasoline. An unkempt author stands inside your darkened house, and guess what’s on his breath?
“They can’t see what isn’t lit up.”
He lights a match.
“But they also can’t catch you if you’re on fire.”
In this newsletter:
Jesus Christ, M.P.! Why do you keep sending me unhinged shit like this in my mailbox?
Best of M.P. Fitz 2025 poll results.
Satire as the world dies.
S e c r e t s.
Coming up.
Why is this lunatic emailing me?
…you let me?
But if you forgot how I got into your house: you likely signed up years ago, or you recently grabbed a free book, or you thought me groovy on Substack.
Hi! I’m M.P. Fitzgerald, an unwell sci-fi author who writes warnings with heart for dream criminals. And you?
Oh, you forgot to lock your door.
Art is political if I am in your house, so if that does not groove, then you might want to unsubscribe to lock me out.
No hard feelings, but I am taking your dog with me.
Best of M.P. Fitz 2025 poll results.
I made my stories fight to the death. Paid subscribers got to choose the winner. These were the results:
FATALITY! Speak No Evil, wins!
Speak No Evil was my entry to the second Midnight Vault—a Twilight Zone tribute project spearheaded by J. Curtis and Shane Bzdok (with so, so many great authors contributing). Barring that it gets chosen for publication (fingers crossed), it will remain free to read. I’ll be keeping It’s No Longer Free Speech, which is a fifteen-hundred-word dick joke at our president’s expense, free as well.
You can read all of my stories, for bus fare money, in my archive.
Satire as the world dies, or: an author’s existential terror about art!
I am not unhinged—’cause the door fell out of the frame years ago.
There are two things I have to contend with as a writer of satire. One, the world gets more fuckles faster than I can clown it, and two—marketers of generative AIs like ChatGPT do everything they can to undermine the idea of writing something yourself, therefore stripping away the value of an author.
In 2019 I released my post-apocalyptic novel, A Happy Bureaucracy, shortly followed by its sequels Fear and Loathing in the Wasteland, and Post-Apocalyptic Pirates. What was to be a throw-away joke about toilet paper becoming the most expensive and rare luxury item in the apocalypse became a reality just a year later with the COVID-19 shutdowns. What was supposed to be the most over-the-top “Mad Max-inspired vehicle” I could think of as a gag, The Colonel’s motorcycle chariot, became the least interesting vehicle in Furiosa just five years later.
But “predicting the future” with gags was not what kept me from putting out the next books and finishing the series. The book was a love letter to nuclear holocaust books, games, movies… etc., with the “ha ha” being that the IRS, the most dry institution on the planet, not just surviving the end of the world, but thriving, to lambast the “lone gunman” power fantasy that permeates so much of this genre. It would be a fun story to return to. But in the time the last book was released, we got a man who tried to overthrow the government after losing a fair election, and was later re-elected, and is the Epstein files, as well as Nazi saluting billionaires pillaging our art and cultural inheritance for chatbots, and if I keep writing this sentence I will go insane because every day we make the horrors of Snow Crash and Neuromancer look like an easy episode of The Muppet Babies.
Art takes effort, it takes time, capital, craft, and talent. By the time I was halfway finished on a draft for the fourth book, Russia invaded Ukraine on the flimsiest of pretenses, the Wagner Group mutinied and marched up to Moscow with zero contestation and then CHANGED THEIR MINDS. I could not keep up.
And that was only a few years ago.
Andy Futuro, author of HALLWAY, and fellow sci-fi/horror satirist, recently said something to the effect that he approached cyberpunk and such by thinking of a dumb world, and then imagining it even dumber. Respect. The problem I have, is that I did that and the world went “fuck you, hold my beer” on me. I am a rather cynical, grumpy man. I’ve been a seventy-year old crumugeon since I was twelve, and the world surpasses even my most pessimistic ideations at lightspeed. I may have won a ( single) flash fiction battle against Futuro, but I’ll be the first to say he does this better (which I greatly admire).
You may not believe this, but I am very much in the “it is your duty to lambast fascism with art” camp, and I think I, as an artist, should be doing this as long as I can (I don’t think we have much time left to do so), and, frankly, my Happy Bureaucracy series was not cutting it.
Pinocchio, the liar, was an artifice
Fascism hates art, because art says something, and those in jackboots need constant control of what is and what isn’t allowed to be discussed. To quote reddit quoting tumblr quoting Dan Olson (I told you this was a rant):
“They don’t want these complexities to exist, and by talking about them, you make them exist. It’s a form of magical thought. Talking about police brutality wills police brutality into existence. A Disruption of the status quo is seen as a disruption of the natural order. The Problem they see is that no one has made those people shut up. That is what they want: someone to come in and make those people shut up and go away, to put things back ‘where they belong.’
…
Their will is a hammer that they are using to beat reality itself into a shape of their choosing, a simple world where reality is exactly what it looks like through their eyes, devoid of complexity, devoid of change, where they are right, and their enemies are silent. They are trying to build a flat earth.”
This is why you see Fox News in outrage every time there is a new Star Trek series or movie released—even at its tamest, it imagines a better world, and a better world than you live in, right now, is a problem for those in charge. But Star Trek is profitable; it moves merchandise, and those same people in charge really dig it when they make money. So what are you to do as a rich oligarch when you both love money but need the flock to ignore the slaughterhouse and keep on keepin’ that status quo?
You undermine art itself by taking away the value of an artist from the minds of the people. And this, I believe, is the endgame for LLM and generative AI.
If the writer is disposable, because a machine can do it, then you can rob the writer of legitimacy, and thus equate art and the machine’s slop as the same thing—and that’s powerful. Slop doesn’t say anything, and therefore doesn’t need to be silenced. The complexities of art that threaten the status quo are lost in the constant, total noise that only a machine is capable of.
And these are the two biggest problems I face as a satirist trying to write in a series of books:
The world moves fast and the point of the series is quickly antiquated.
Every day, giant tech companies actively undermine the value of art for profit.
I am not hopeless. Despite what is happening, I do still believe that making art, especially in this moment, is the most important thing I can do. They may mean to bury the dreamers in rancid slop and hope them to drown, but art exists to create connection. People long for human connection. But to make the most effective art I can to fight off authoritarianism and the consolidation of oligarchical power, I think I have to shelve writing in a series, for now, and write standalone books with better, laser-focused intent. I earnestly think that is how I can best impact what is around me with my art.
As much as I adore my Happy Bureaucracy series, it exists only because I found out that the IRS has a contingency for collecting taxes after nuclear war—that shit is too funny not to lambast. But the intention behind it ended there. It is genre parody, and right now I need to write satire, if only so that I can look myself in the mirror. I do not intend to be shelving the series permanently, but I will be writing other things so long as my heart dictates it. I am sorry if that is disappointing to read. I can only promise, in the meantime, that what book I publish next will be fire.
S e c r e t s
The short stories I wrote last year were very much in preparation for what I intend to write soon. They let me explore some of the more immediate ideas and dangers on my mind, but, more importantly, were written to better my craft. I am at a place now where I am comfortable attempting the book I need to write, and that confidence is something I will milk for as long as I can.
I am tinkering with the idea of releasing the stories in paperback before I finish the next book. If that is something you want, let me know! I’d love to, but only if there is enough interest from you.
Coming up…
Expect the first part of a mini-serial in your inbox this month. Yes, I said last month, but the fine print said ideally so… Look I have ADHD, we doin’ our best here, what’s in your cupboard?
The first part will be free. The rest will be paywalled. I’ll have a warning at the top for those who can’t afford to upgrade so they don’t get invested in something they can’t finish (A Happy Bureaucracy glares at me in disgust). Money from the other parts will afford me space to work on the bigger stuff for you, which is always the goal.
My goodbyes are lies
Gasoline is cheap, and my stories are gunna be doused in it. If the page doesn’t burn, why do it?
I’ll see y’all soon, good readers. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.
-M.P. Fitz
M.P. Fitzgerald writes darkly humorous sci-fi for dream criminals. Lock your door or he might rant at you again.
If we are to survive as satirists in this world, we must follow the immortal words of Weird Al Yankovic and "Dare to be stupid."
I would gladly pick up a paper back, and also I'm excited to read what you got coming down the pipes! Art's one of the most important things we can be doing right now, that resonates my man. Keep up the good work.