Reply-All at the End of the World
A Parable About Unpaid Labor... Composed After Being Asked to Peer Review Too Many Times... And written after the Author Was Caught Engaged in Labor During A Strike Day... The last unpaid reviewer died on a Tuesday, sometime after the armistice bells began to ring across the Perseid Belt. No one knew their name. The archives listed them only as External_Reviewer_7, field of expertise: “science fiction, trans* studies, or both.” Cause of death: exhaustion induced by recursive footnotes. Time of death: indeterminate. They had been revising their comments for thirty-six standard cycles when the war finally ended and the galaxy abolished the practice that had sustained it. For decades, the Intergalactic Consortium of Journals had broadcast its calls into deep space: We are looking for reviewers with publication experience and expertise in either science fiction, trans studies, or both…* The calls traveled faster than light, faster than mercy. They slipped through wormholes and into the sof...