A few years ago, I was sitting on a train talking to the second-most-interesting person I’ve ever met: a guy who had some genuinely compelling story about literally any subject you could possibly think of.

I don’t know if they were all true, but I know they weren’t entirely true: like, I found some local news articles confirming he — a gay service member — had publicly resigned from the military in protest of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, but nothing to prove the part that needed proving, which is that said resignation was the reason DADT got overturned.

In any case, it made sense when he told me he’s an author. And as he gloated about audiences and critics alike lauding his novels for their evocative imagery, I told him about my lack of a visual imagination — which I now know is called “aphantasia” — and he seemed genuinely startled that his apparently acclaimed words could evoke nothing for me.

Folks who watched my Autism Adventure/Allistic Odyssey have heard me talk about Aphantasia enough: that it’s a fairly large hurdle to reading fiction in general and that I read through the entire 1800 pages of R.F. Kuang’s Poppy War trilogy (in less than a week!) without “seeing” a thing. 

But I didn’t talk about how weird it was that I read that trilogy, because it was super weird because full stop I do not read fantasy books. As a kid, sure: I had a bunch of Reds-wall and Harries Potter, but I put down Fellowship of the Ring once they got to the talking trees and never even attempted denser fantasies than that. The Poppy War was the first book of its kind I’d read in well over a decade: a decision inspired by my enjoyment of Kuang’s not-fantasy book Yellowface as well as a free month of Kindle Unlimited and an unusual amount of downtime I didn’t want to fill with other media. 

And I liked it! Certainly wouldn’t have blazed through it (second attempt at this pun) in a week if I hadn’t. Kuang’s writing just goes down easy, and my enjoyment of it — and her follow-up, Babel — was proof that “fantasy” wasn’t really the problem… without helping me understand what was (is). I was still left wondering:

Why do I not like fantasy? And Why is the more futuristic/alt-history sci-fi so hard for me to get through? And could it also be Why I’m so disinterested in period pieces? 

To answer those questions, enter A.R. Moxon.

Moxon fascinates me. He was first put on my radar earlier this year by Film Crit Hulk, who quoted him while discussing the phenomenal second season of Andor: 

“Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed. 

That word is "Nazi." Nobody cares about their motives anymore.”

Moxon posted those words on January 17, 2017 — mere days before the first coronation. They’re good words. Fighting words, even.

He now has a weekly newsletter, The Reframe, which has — fittingly — reframed my thinking more than once. He also reviews episodes of LOST. I’ve never seen LOST, so I skip those ones.

(But the fact that he does media criticism on top of his essays makes me feel especially bad about my own skills as both a writer and a thinker.)  

Among his writings is The Revisionaries, a nearly-600-page novel that I violently disagree with being deemed “Science Fiction.” I don’t believe anyone checking out the Sci-Fi aisle is looking for a story like this. I’m not sure if they’re looking for it in Fantasy either, but a lengthy digression about a magical fountain whose image strikes fear into the hearts of those who see it and whose water causes the drinker to forget everything that’s ever happened to them is Fantasy shit, and it’s weird as hell that anyone’s claimed otherwise. 

And when I say “Lengthy digression,” I really do mean it: those dozens and dozens of pages detailing its discovery and early use are important to the plot and also to understanding the odd structure of the novel itself… but they’re also too many pages that don’t have much to do with what came before them — many of which are set in old-timey-type times and again: not a fan of period pieces. 

Pair this with Moxon’s use of words that are not only too big for me but for the Bookshop.org app’s dictionary (it appears to fail on plurals and conjugations, which is infuriating and also kinda pathetic for an app in 2025), and I’ll admit there were some points that I considered putting it down and not picking it back up. 

But I’m glad I stuck through that slog and the occasional other, because golly does this book have some fascinating ideas about stories and storytelling and what art is and what it means to make art, and in one brain-fuck of a sequence it finally made me understand what my problem is.

Around the two-thirds mark, a character we have seen on occasions summons two others we have seen a whole lot to explain that he is the author of the fictional story that they (the other characters) are living in.

It’s a powerful move done from a place of weakness, because while he can rewrite these characters beliefs and even backstories in an instant, he’s not really able to control them. Which is one of those difficulties of authorship that people don’t give enough credit to.

There are many philosophies of writing, but I’ve always preferred to create a scenario and characters and then see where they go. I have things I would like to happen in the story, sure, and there are things I can do to maybe get them there… but an audience knows contrivance when they see it, and they will roll their eyes at a character acting in a way that serves the plot instead of themselves.

Landrude wants the characters to serve his idea of the plot and so he pops in in an attempt to convince them to do so… but they aren’t interested.

Though I am.  

Because Landrude is not the author of The Revisionaries — or even a fictional novel within The Revisionaries… rather of a fictional comic within The Revisionaries called Cat’s Crib, and the story he’s trying to corral these characters through is in that comic. Which means we’re reading something akin to a novelization, I guess? I dunno. Best not to think too hard about that.

We the audience already know this about Landrude, but when he reveals it to his creations, he adds a key detail: “Does it ever strike you as the least bit odd, that you and everybody you know are all anthropomorphic cartoon cats?” 

…

Honestly, it's one of the most jarring sentences I've ever read, even if it’s a nonsense question. (Why would that have occurred to them? I’ve never looked around and wondered why everyone I know is a three-dimensional ape.)

And it’s made even more jarring by the immediate inclusion of a 4-panel comic strip of the two characters he’s talking to – ones we have spent a whole lot of the preceding 416 pages with – looking at each other in their anthropomorphic feline glory. It is the only time the book does this, and it’s just wild.

And I know I’ve blunted the revelation for you (sorry), but if it makes you feel any better, it totally doesn’t matter (except for the very obvious ways in which it does).

The author continues, explaining his relationship to these characters using the 10-dimensional universe conceptualized in String Theory (maybe that’s why it’s classified as sci-fi? 🤷), during which he asks an extended version of the following:

“Does gravity exist? … Do you know how gravity works? Where it comes from? I don’t. As best I can tell, even the biggest brains in my Everything argue about it. And how about the sky? Or how about the entire country of China? Do they speak Mandarin in China? Of course they do. Do I speak Mandarin? No, I do not. How much of my story—your world—takes place in China? None of it does. And yet, your world has China in it, full of Chinese people speaking Mandarin. How? And, why?”

And somewhere deep in the recesses of my brain, a lightbulb exploded. 

Moxon is not the first person to point out that the rules of the universe and realities of our society are things storytellers gets for free, but putting this creative writing lesson against the revelation that the world I had been exploring for hundreds of pages was actually full of fucking cat people made me feel it.

The fact that an audience will assume that everything in the fictional world is the same as theirs means that for a story set in our world in present day detail is a choice. 

But to tell a story in a different time or on a different world, there's no choice at all. You must detail every way that your characters’ experiences are not like your readers’: their histories and hierarchies and technologies and on and on — and you usually have to front-load it unless you’re specifically aiming to pull the rug (e.g. cat people on page 417), so of course these books tend towards being tomes: how else can they strip you of everything you bring into them so you can meet the new world on its own terms?

And so comes my revelation: they can’t get me there. I am perfectly capable of adding new details to my understanding of things… but overwriting that understanding is far harder – and to do so for just the length of a story? I’m not sure it’s possible. Each change to the rules of the world, each undermining of my assumptions makes it less and less likely that I'll be able to really even follow what's going on. At the end of the day, the worlds are just words.

Fortunately, the world of The Revisionaries is sufficiently Our World to not cause me many problems. Even if they’re cats, there’s still (Cat) China and (Cat) Mandarin and (Cat) Gravity and the (Cat) Failed War to Preserve Slavery (a beautiful descriptor that Moxon reused just two months ago in The Crime of Human Virtue). The fantastical elements feel more like additions than rewrites, in large part because the characters are just as baffled as I would be. I don’t have to imagine a fountain that makes people lose their memory is “normal” or that if I was suddenly pulled into a diner by some loser god that I would have to respect anything he said to me. 

I’m good with this. It’s outside of my frame of reference, but not so far that I feel utterly lost. Which is an exciting thing to feel: it makes me hope that there are more opportunities for fantasy and sci-fi to work for me in a way I always assume they won’t.

Unfortunately, “Expansion or Rewrite” isn’t a filter I can use on Bookshop, but it’s something I could say to someone in a bookshop; it’s language that I can use to help people understand me as I better understand myself.

Huh. There he goes again… always reframing my thinking.

Seven Point Five / 10