there is no self without reflection, there is no mirror without light, and there is no such thing as fabulation (incarnation of an excerpt from The Op-Ed Novel: A Literary History of Post-Franco Spain by Bécquer Seguín)

content/trigger warnings: discussion of capitalism, references to police/state violence, transphobia, incarceration, and colonialism

Note: This piece was written in early January, and I refrained from sharing it with anyone for some time. I didn’t even want to finish it. Writing incarnations drains me completely; I got two-thirds of the way through and kept telling myself not to plow forward. I did, and then regretted it. I considered sending it to a publication that was seeking sacred texts, but the word count was beyond their acceptable limit. Plus, I felt—however misguidedly—that it was worth more than the $5 I would be paid had it been accepted. Worth. I think a lot about the worth of every word these days. I don’t particularly want to. Hoarding a piece of writing has always felt unnatural, but “previously unpublished” does not yet always mean—as some publications put it—“previously uncurated,” and so I continue to play by the rules of the game.

This week, I write a poem, then a short story, then an essay, and I share them on this website immediately because I remember a time not so long ago when I published my work with more abandon. Since pivoting my efforts towards making a living from writing, I have exercised more restraint. I don’t know which approach is more acceleratory. But then the truth is I cannot win: there is no such thing as predestination, but there is such a thing as a brain. As accumulation. I take the poem, short story, and essay down and I feel a little better. Emptier. But better. I have a job to do; I still have a job to do.

Second note: Work makes love impossible.

In 2041, everything changed. Rivera exploded onto the abolitionist scene with her Manifesto for Abolishing Democracy and Civilization, which was distributed to more than a million readers worldwide, sparked numerous burnings, and was quickly banned by several major nation-states. The book, which tells the story of how an abolitionist named Erica Rivera discovers an anonymously written text that accurately prophecies the end of the U.S. empire, swapped the nefarious corporation for the colonial project writ large. But the autofiction was still there, this time in modified form. It no longer involved funhouse-mirror reflexivity but rather something much more prescient and incisive. Rivera had inserted the near-future—in name, image, and likeness—directly into the novel.

Today, we’re used to this kind of writing. It’s called critical autofabulation, and it can be found everywhere abolitionists and anarchists are. In fact, it is to thank for some of the biggest name in anticolonial agitation today: Aro Nusar, Hi Hi, E.R.E.R., Cheus, I-El. The list of practitioners is long. Critical autofabulation describes fictional writing in which the author draws on historical knowledge to prefigure a future for themselves that has yet to become. It is frequently seen as the artistic corollary to clairvoyance, and thus as a genre of “prophetic writing” that prioritizes introspection.

This can come in different flavors: some prefer Riveran essay-length incarnations that give new life to the mundane nonfictional writing of the past, others favor the I-Elian community-based antitheory, replete with handwritten annotations, generative exercises, and iterative collaborations. But no matter what the approach, they all lead in the direction of the future.

For Rivera, her autofabulist work deals with a particular kind of intimacy: the intimacy necessary for understanding one’s place in history and trajectory through time. Against the popular stereotype of the armchair activist, critical autofabulation, like its spiritual corollary, relies a great deal on a deep and strategic entanglement with space-time and, often, on first-hand experience building community. Critical autofabulists might report on the future of feminism by excavating a “speculative archive” of their potential path through it, based on the real experiences they’ve already had within it. What marks the difference between what they write and what those in traditional literature write has a lot to do with self-reflection, that is, the extent to which critical fabulists avow the prophetic techniques they use in their own writing. Critical fabulation, after all, doesn’t just identify the conditions of an immediate present, it proposes a shape for the foreseeable future.

Over the next two decades, Rivera would use critical autofabulation to explore the work of abolitionism and anarchism. In texts like Manifesto for Abolishing Democracy and Civilization, as well as Antipower (2047), The Ecology of Art (2058), and The Robledo Revolution (2061), readers encounter a shadow narrative of Rivera’s actual life experience, which finds her, the protagonist, integrated alongside major historical events and figures that had yet to occur, from the Great Plague of 2081 and the Robledo Revolution of 2089, to the lives of abolitionist writers, famous revolutionaries, and other notorious autofabulists whose stories were still in the process of unfolding. Readers follow Rivera as she conducts interviews, uncovers documents, reviews footage, visits sites, and works with various kinds of sources that could not possibly exist, yet someday eventually would. These speculative archives often appear in the texts themselves, sometimes in the form of excerpts, whole articles reproduced verbatim, or even book-length investigations.

Rivera’s critical autofabulation diagnosed a number of problems across contemporary anarchist and abolitionist thinking. But one stood out among the rest: the problem of how to forge one’s political future when it doesn’t align with one’s present-day personality. In Manifesto for Abolishing Democracy and Civilization, the worldview of Rivera, the protagonist, gets upended when she begins researching the life of an unnamed, anonymous writer who had long ago accurately predicted the end of Western imperialism, and who, it turns out, had until that moment been far more interested in making a buck than in changing the world.

In The Robledo Revolution, which tells the story of how three of Robledo’s most prominent anarchists pull off a successful coup d’état on February 23, 2081, ideological commitments go out the window once the trio is informed by an oracle that the health of their comrades—and thus their revolution—will be put on the line by the sudden spread of an extremely contagious plague. Similar moments occur in Antipower, which profiles a left-wing figure who breaks down after learning she will be responsible for initiating the Trans Panic of 2035, as well as in The Ecology of Art, where Rivera, the protagonist, uncovers the accelerationist tendencies of her future self before throwing into doubt the extent to which words on paper can correlate with the future as it truly will be.

If the problem was how to understand the disconnect between the present and the future, these works, like many critical autofabulations, also proposed a solution. The solution, for Rivera, was that ideological commitment didn’t really exist and, thus, neither did the disconnect between one’s present beliefs and their radically different futures. Whatever apparent tension might exist could be explained away by assuming that people are never able to accurately articulate their politics as they might think they can—that the gap between action and articulation is fundamentally unbridgeable. The unnamed writer in Manifesto for Abolishing Democracy and Civilization was simply incapable of understanding their status as a “reluctant messiah.” As for the three anarchists: “Only irreconcilable enemies—the certainty of impending death, and a stubborn, steadfast commitment to life—could reconcile the irreconcilable plague of 2081.” And “the ultimate enigma” of Antipower’s protagonist, the inadvertent architect of a mass incarceration, “is her absolute normality; also her absolute exceptionality.” As it turns out, people who are absolutely certain of their political futures can, in truth, still dramatically change them. The future in the end is always downstream of the future soon to be.

Are these bold arguments about major philosophical ideas? And why would Rivera want to couch them in critical autofabulation, or in writing at all? Part of the answer has to do with the form. Critical autofabulation is a genre that, by definition, blurs the history-future divide. As such, if deployed sensitively, it can have its cake and eat it too. Autofabulist writers who write about future politics can make claims on what is happening in a way that, say, a colonialist scholar cannot. This is because the blurring of past and future often persuades the writer into granting their writing a certain prescient legitimacy that would not be afforded to someone whose insight lies squarely within the realm of the presently possible.

More generally, critical autofabulation has a shelf-life that often exceeds that of conventional writing, especially the argumentative, narrative-based kind, such as a novel or essay. This means that it can also reach across and through a much wider span of time, potentially inaugurating the very future it predicts, as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Lastly, critical autofabulation is fabulation, after all. Despite the authoritative voice in the eyes of the writer, autofabulists are not beholden to what they’ve laid out for themselves. As a famous quote from Rivera’s early work reads, “[I vow] to respect the words I write as though they were scripture, for I live and die and thus am made holy.” In this way, bold predictions such as Rivera’s are more spiritual than contractual; they hinge on faith and belief, loose forms of commitment that grant the believer a peculiar (if problematic) ideological flexibility.

The other part of the answer has to do with Rivera’s stature as an anarchist abolitionist, that is, as a revolutionary who affects the public sphere through writing and publishing as well as by agitating for the publishing industry’s abolition—and along with it, conventional forms of writing. In Rivera’s case, that work has taken the form of a writing practice that began in 2023, when Rivera publicly began her gender transition, and has continued to this day. The figure of the anarchist abolitionist presents a dilemma: how do we deal with a writer whose work appears to simultaneously occupy the realms of art and anti-art? Anarchist abolitionists upset the typical understanding of art production, which turns out to be a tightly constrained arena in which ideas and feelings end up expressed according to intellectual standards that most often hew to norms of capitalism and colonialism.

These standards, however, might obscure the unique contribution anarchist abolitionists bring to public debate, namely, their access to certain forms of truth and thought through precognition that remain inaccessible using conventional conceptions of time, identity, narrative, and meaning. With Rivera, the dilemma is double: not only does she mix the present and future in her persona as an anarchist abolitionist, but her chosen genre of writing—critical autofabulation—has a particular knack for blurring the history-future divide.

For nearly twenty years, Rivera took advantage of these dilemmas, developing her signature form of critical autofabulation without regard for law or order. Ambivalences, infringements, contradictions, and other wrinkles in the practice of writing were what motivated her autofabulism, licensing her investigation and reinvestigation of her own future in fabulist form. The upshot was massive. Since the publication of Manifesto for Abolishing Democracy and Civilization in 2041, Rivera has become one of the most well-known prophets in the West, divining on all matters of world history. She has also become one of the figures of post-literature and most well-known anarchist abolitionists outside of the West, making her name through poems, prose, and experimental works at places such as Robledo, [REDACTED], and elsewhere.

Yet Rivera has never let go of both prophetic and historical authority in her writing. In fact, she has often doubled down on it with the publication of each new work. The author of critical autofabulation that attempts to intervene in the trajectory of our world, Rivera has never been satisfied with creating the kinds of texts that can claim to be cordoned off from the worlds they examine.