Guest Author:
Championing:
by The Pneumanaut
Greeting, friends! If I could take up but a moment of your time, I’d love for you to check out the writing of my dear fellow Substacker, Joshua Lavender, who’s writing I’ve admired since I first began charting these cyber-seas.
First, a bit of context. I began writing here in late December 2024, not quite sure what I was doing or what I hoped to achieve besides growing some kind of audience for my rather weird but (at least to me) interesting takes on sci-fi, theology and spirituality. Pretty soon I stumbled across the Sci-Friday community here, who regularly post bits of their work or just things which caught their eye, all to do with science fiction. It seemed like a great way to start rubbing shoulders with people, checking out the scene and perhaps even making a bit of a splash myself.
But the tagging was a nightmare. You might have seen one of two Sci-Friday posts circulating around on Notes. If you’ve had the bravery to scroll right to the bottom of those posts, you know exactly what I’m talking about—a monstrously long list of names jumbled together in a heap of @ symbols and blue text. And the list has only grown longer since the start of the year! If you’ve not done a Sci-Friday post yourself, then you wouldn’t know that every single one of those names needs to be individually typed, after which a prompt will arise where you will need to disambiguate the person you want to actually tag from a list of others whose handles somewhat resemble the one you’ve written. An arduous process, to say the least. What made it even more overwhelming was that different Substackers each had their own versions of this list, with different sets of individuals collected together.
Enter into the scene our Sci-Friday savior, Joshua Lavender. This man took it upon himself to organize all of these scattershot taglists drifting about and compile them into a single, standardized master list. He also wrote a detailed post laying out exactly how to go about tagging everybody in as efficient a manner as possible, as well as laying out the ground rules for how to do so responsibly. You can check it out here, in case you’re interested in getting involved.
Did anyone ask him to do this? No. Did he stand to gain anything substantial from this undertaking? I suppose not (though I did send him a paid sub for his efforts, which I felt should not go unappreciated!) The truth is, Joshua did all this because he believes in community, believes in the independent writers contributing here, and wanted to help foster that spirit of collaboration and mutual support. I reached out to him via private message to let him know how much I valued the work he was doing; this turned into an ongoing correspondence which I greatly value as we’ve read each other’s work, shared critiques and more generally gotten to know one another better. As such, I feel I’m in a position to state that, most assuredly, Joshua Lavender is a stand up fella.
But look a me—I’ve gone on all this time and I haven’t even mentioned his writing! Did you think that I admired Joshua simply because of his organizational skills? Heavens, no! Joshua has impressed me not only with his beautiful prose and skillful storytelling, but also the breadth of topics he covers in his not one, but two different publications:
Singular Dream — a home for Joshua’s essays, short stories as well as his serialized novel, Quibble, a far-future sci-fi story
Fool in the Woods — a place for Joshua’s more personal meditations, poetry and memoirs, often describing his travels across of the American countryside
If you’re looking for a place to start getting into Joshua’s writing, there’s no better place than Quibble, which acts as his flagship piece, so to speak. I’ve not read the entire novel yet, but the beginning is very intriguing. As a sci-fan fan myself, I think it’s really interesting to consider what our world might like in the far, far future—as in, thousands upon thousands of years in the future. Will we even recognize ourselves as a species anymore? How will our technologies continue to transform us, just as they’ve transformed us in the past? The world Joshua has created explores these questions, and what he describes is eerily fascinating. Check out this ‘Start Here!’ post if you’d like to read:
Joshua also has a really interesting series of essays on the subject of the Singularity, where he examines some of the prominent thinkers and critiques their ideas. I’ve read the first couple of entries and have found them to be delightfully insightful and thought-provoking. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the ethical and moral quandaries that arise from the rapid advancements we are making towards Artificial General Intelligence, but I can’t say I’ve reached any definitive conclusions besides it’s really scary. Really, really scary. Check out Infinite Lock-In if you’re someone who also is interesting to contemplating where we’re heading:
As for me, what I admire most about Joshua’s writing is his unrivaled capacity to self-assess and relate his personal thoughts and feelings with grace, earnestness, honesty and beauty. Seriously, this is memoir writing at it’s finest. His Losing My Religion trilogy of essays were the first bits of writing I encountered of his, which he graciously shared with me after coming across my introductory post. Your heart will break as he brings you through his journey out of restrictive religiosity toward greater self-understanding. I think I referred to it during one of our chats as a kind of ‘anti-testimony’, which I do not in any way mean as a bad thing. Though I’m a person of faith myself, I know how damaging a religious upbringing can be for a person. Genuinely, Joshua’s recounting of his personal experience with growing up and leaving the church is one of the most moving things I’ve ever read (and it is also incredibly well-told; he’s got a real talent for expressing complicated ideas and emotions in succinct, crystal-clear language).
Anyway, that’s all from me, folks. Just take my word for it: Joshua Lavender is a guy you want to be subscribed to. So why are you still here, listening to me natter on? Go smash that Sub button and improve the quality of your reading list today!
And thanks to Thaddeus Thomas for the opportunity to promote other wonderful authors on his platform! That Champion series is one of the best ideas anybody’s had, hands down. Let’s all continue to build each other up and help indie writers to get the recognition they deserve!
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What a lovely gesture! Thank you, Pneumanaut, for generously championing my writing!
For those who want to know, my profile picture (the artwork at the top of this post) is not AI-generated. It's called "The Mirror of Erised," after the artifact in the Harry Potter books, and it's the creation of the photographer Christian Hopkins, whose surreal imagery fascinates me. I first saw it on the cover of a literary journal. By design, I believe, the mirror resembles a smartphone, and I thought the photo perfectly captures the trap and the toll of tech mediation in society, a key theme in my science fiction. Someday, if Quibble comes out in print, I hope Christian will let me use this image for the book cover, even though none of my characters look like this person. You can see more of Christian's artwork here: https://www.christianhopkinsphotography.com/
What a great highlight! Adding his work to my saved list!