!Books about enclaves --- agk's diary 29 November 2021 @ 00:28 --- started on Pinebook Pro while Evy works and baby tries to crawl; finished when I'm the only one awake. --- Sterling (1985). Green days in Brunei (short story). Solderpunk recommended this (thank you!). Fast and sweet, it describes life in what'd now be called a solarpunk enclave. 1970s industrial robots are being restored to assemble low-tech oceangoing vessels. Outside the enclave, the world is ordinary, a good 1985 prediction of the 2020s. The story is driven by character and a technical challenge. It explores the social organization, politics, economy, and culture of a small society some of us on gopher and gemini would build or visit. Sacco (2000). Safe area Goražde: The war in eastern Bosnia 1992-95. I first read this in 2000. The break-up of Yugo- slavia and Bosnian war were central geopolitical events of my childhood. This remains the best comix journalism I've read. Sacco visited the rural eastern Bosnian enclave often after UN's "blue road" restored limited access. It was cut off from the world by Serbian Chetnik seige for three years, and could have ended like nearby Srebrenica in mass graves. Sacco introduces us to characters: "Silly girls" who want Levis 501 Originals, a grad student turned teacher/soldier/interpreter, and wonder- fully human others. He doesn't lay on pity, nor avoid politics or hyperviolence. He grounds life in everyday challenges: fixing the roof, gener- ating electricity from Drina river with scav- enged alternators in "mini-centrales," getting food and firewood into town, and surviving bore- dom as much as death or fear. The pictures are drawn with great love and care. Lowrey (2015). Lost boi. A transmasc, intergenerational leather family squat a warehouse to give young leatherbois a place to run away to and play forever. It isn't erotica (I totally thought it would be), but a novel about adventure, love, and making a home in ruins like Peter Pan and his boys did. If you've run with queer squatter punks, feminist sexworkers, or gay leathermen, it might feel *real* familiar. Tobocman (1999). War in the neighborhood. Comix about the the '80s squatter scene in New York City's Lower East Side. Each chapter is a story about peoples' struggles to work together to make their squatter enclave possible and live- able. The author was there; it shows. The charac- ters confront history, build a (counter)culture, do low-tech reconstruction of brownstones, struggle, and face city and developer repression. I read this when I was a young squatter. A friend of the author loaned me a copy. It gave me courage and awareness of "the cop in my head" (how I relate to people). It inspired me to try tough things to hold off police a little longer and make a good home. That first squat (and the people who were part of it) was my favorite home, the place I felt most free. My romance with pubnix here on sdf, free software/ culture, gopher, and low-power social junkyard tinker- ing has commonalities with these stories' places. We carve out maroon redoubts---small, carefully maint- ained *other* places (in Foucault's parlance, hetero- topias) amid threats of carnage and ruin. We want (and make) places we hope will be a little more free, convivial, ethical, and pleasurable, where we fit, survive, and can productively engage in making and maintaining of our world. I'm reading: * Aho, Kernighan, Weinberger (1988). The AWK prog- ramming language (pg 12). * MacIntyre (1981, 2007). After virtue: A study in moral theory (pg 55). At winter break I hope to get back to reading Will- iams' (1965) novel Stoner aloud with Cassie. Happy winter reading!