(2022) Audrey Szasz
Available @ Amphetamine Sulphate
Novella, 74 pages — contained in the sci-fi anthology HUMAN RIGHTS edited by Philip Best
Amphetamine Sulphate Science Fiction is here.
AVAILABLE AND NOW SHIPPING
614 pages
Perfect bound
8.5 x 6.5″
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Over 600 pages of original SF novellas and stories by Thomas Moore, Audrey Szasz, Christopher Zeischegg, Simon Morris (his final completed novella), Blake Butler, Kenji Siratori, SJXSJC, Alexandrine Ogundimu, David Cotner, Ian Haig and Philip Best, plus Adam Lehrer on Crypto-Transgression in Art and Jarett Kobek interviewed by Grant Maierhofer. With a selected bibliography, 1967-1978.
Limited copies receive Philip Best signed postcard.
B&W illustrations by Steven Purtill.
EU/UK customers please order from Cargo Records
https://cargorecordsdirect.co.uk/products/various-edited-by-philip-best-human-rights-copy
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To obstinately fight a losing battle against forces which I will never fully comprehend. To willingly submit to specific forms of humiliation and degradation whilst inwardly regarding myself as a victim. To assert my independence only sporadically via a series of abortive gestures that I implore you to counteract. To endlessly make plans and promises that I will never follow through on. To compulsively produce lists, quotas and timetables which will never be adhered to or fulfilled. To sell myself, body and soul, knowing there is no absolution and all of my sacrifices are inherently meaningless. To flinch at the sight of brutality and yet fantasise erotically about being controlled and abused. To remorselessly hate. To be young and bitter. To surrender to everything in a self-negating anticlimactic pantomime of obedience (whilst secretly despising all forms of authority) and openly boasting about one’s recurring dreams of being dominated and/or discarded like one of your inevitable gynoid automatons (youthfully proportioned). To embrace all paradoxes, contradictions and inconsistencies as supremely relevant and strictly necessary; chronic fantasy occluding object relations. Abject fatalism, defeatism, despair = desire (ergo vice versa, ipso facto, caveat emptor etc etc). Manifestations of coincidence and synchronicity are non-transmutable numinous tokens. I am not an animal. Please collar me, chain me like a dog and whip me in the yard. Endless self-pity. The joy of servitude. Anger, rage, frustration. Tranquillity, docility; little child, meek and mild. Kill me, kill me, kill me. Help me to kill this LOVE. They’re wirelessly stealing my thoughts. They’re filching my molecules. Paradise does not exist. This suffering is real. Pain = REALITY. I am all there is. I am an übermädchen. I AM SCUM. You can only worship me. Mechanisation of romance. Reductionism applied persistently and erroneously to all things. Interior of Vaucanson’s Automatic Duck. A, clockwork; B, pump; C, mill for grinding grain; F, intestinal tube; J, bill; H, head; M, feet.I am the only one who is worthy to shine your shoes. I will meticulously clean your leather footwear. Entropy, inertia (in search of a self-perpetuating automimetic ideal). I am the veiled orifice that irreversibly draws you in. I am the diminutive portal to our mutual degradation.
— Audrey Szasz, A-Z of Robomasochism
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Audrey Szasz’s “A-Z of Robomasochism” is an inventive commentary on our abusive relationship with technology. Through a call and response between news headlines and rebuttals from their compromised subjects, Szasz implies the more our robotics resemble human behavior and form, the more it exacerbates our self-hatred, until we lash out. Unsatisfied with merely playing God, we destroy to create only to destroy it again.
— Gabriel Hart, LitReactor
Audrey Szasz 
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