They Called Her Rebel: Speculative Fiction, Revolutionary Art, and the Politics of Imagination

Rev Left Radio

Breht O'Shea

Communism, Politics, Liberalism, Society & Culture, Philosophy, News, History, Leftwing, Socialism, Marxism

4.8 • 3.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 November 2025

⏱️ 110 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, Breht speaks with Jacob Dallas-Main, co-host of Workers' Lit and author of They Called Her Rebel; a dazzling fusion of fantasy, class struggle, and storytelling set in a world of debtors' camps, collapsing empires, and revolutionary possibility.

The two discuss how speculative fiction can illuminate political struggle, not merely as metaphor but as a call to break the boundary between audience and participant. They explore what makes a work of art revolutionary rather than consumable, the dangers of reactionary storytelling in popular culture, declining literacy in the U.S., the threats posed by AI, the need for socialist transformation, and why imagination is a vital force in times of despair.

From Le Guin to Kim Stanley Robinson to Lee Mandelo, they trace a lineage of speculative art that refuses cynicism and insists on transformation -- both political and personal.

Check out our episode with Kim Stanely Robinson on his book "Ministry for the Future" HERE

Subscribe to Workers Lit podcast on youtube HERE

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio.
0:09.2	On today's episode, I have on the show Jacob Dallas from what used to be the Socialist Shelf podcast is now the Workers Lit Pod, which we'll talk about in this episode.
0:20.2	On to talk about speculative fiction,
0:23.1	art, film, television, novels, and the political components of them. This is a wide-ranging
0:30.1	conversation. We start off talking about the literacy crisis in the United States. We talk about
0:35.7	the importance of cultivating a reading routine, a writing
0:40.0	routine, the importance of creating art for its own sake. We talk about, you know, famous works
0:46.2	of speculative fiction from the dispossessed and Ministry for the Future to 1984 in zombie movies.
0:55.2	And we talk about the political, ideological constitution of those works of art and how to
1:01.4	critically engage with such art, films, novels, etc.
1:06.6	We talk about Jacob's new book in which, you know, he world builds and integrates a political landscape from a Marxist perspective and really, you know, imbues that into the subjectivity of his characters and just has these layers of meaning that I find so impressive to see a friend write a book like this.
1:27.1	The book is, of course, called, they Called Her Rebel, linked to in the show notes,
1:31.4	and we'll talk a little bit about that.
1:32.9	But again, it expands beyond just his book and talks about art much more broadly.
1:37.7	And I think this is a fascinating conversation.
1:40.2	We talk about current events, what we want in a left-wing political leader and what we don't
1:45.2	see in the ostensible leaders of the left in the U.S. today, how to get kids interested in
1:51.7	reading, the importance of meditation for your attentional capacity and the development of your
1:58.5	subjective evolution and the subjective forces of revolution,
2:02.7	how art itself can deepen and strengthen the subjective forces of revolutionary politics.
2:09.9	So as always, if you like what we do here at RevLeft Radio, we are 100% listener funded always have been,
2:15.7	always will be.
	...

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