Introduction

“Crisis Actors,” co-authored by Maddison Stoff and Corey Jae White and published in Strange Horizons in January 2025, represents a significant entry in contemporary speculative fiction’s engagement with surveillance capitalism, state violence, and revolutionary praxis. As one of five winners of the Stop Copaganda short story contest—run in collaboration with Fight for the Future, Rightscon, and COMPOST Magazine—the story occupies a unique position at the intersection of activist literature and science fiction. Both authors bring established credentials to this collaboration: Stoff, known for “unapologetically leftist, feminist, & queer fiction,” and White, an Aurealis Award winner for Repo Virtual, demonstrate their commitment to politically engaged speculative fiction. This review argues that “Crisis Actors” succeeds as a provocative meditation on resistance ethics in a surveillance state, though its narrative structure and characterization reveal tensions between didactic impulse and literary complexity that ultimately serve the story’s subversive intent.

Plot Summary

Set in a near-future authoritarian United States governed by the Department for a Safe America, “Crisis Actors” follows two parallel narratives that converge in a devastating climax. The first follows Michael, a “Watcher” employed to monitor surveillance feeds and report suspicious activity to ICE, FBI, or police. After witnessing a mass shooting that triggers his traumatic response, Michael becomes an unwitting audience member for the story’s second narrative thread: a troupe of queer anarchist “crisis actors” led by the enigmatic December, who stage fake acts of terrorism designed to psychologically break surveillance workers and expose state violence.

The troupe—comprising Zephyr, Rosa, Gillian, Charlii, and newcomer Kitty—escalates from warehouse performances to an elaborate operation targeting Eve, a trans woman “Keeper” who commands armed drones to eliminate supposed threats. Through Kitty’s honeypot operation, the group gathers intelligence on Eve while planning their magnum opus: staging a fake terror cell in an abandoned house while the real action unfolds across the street, where Eve’s drones kill a senator and his family during dinner. The story concludes with the troupe debating whether to release evidence of the state-sanctioned massacre, positioning their act as “the start of the end” of the surveillance regime.

Critical Analysis

Themes and Ideas

The story’s central thematic concern is the moral calculus of revolutionary violence within a totalitarian surveillance state. Stoff and White construct a world where Foucauldian panopticism has achieved technological apotheosis—the “Omniscience Network” represents not merely surveillance but the transformation of watching into a bureaucratic industry complete with “Watchers” and “Keepers.” The story’s genius lies in its reversal of the titular phrase: whereas “crisis actors” in contemporary conspiracy discourse refers to alleged fake victims of real tragedies, here the actors stage fake tragedies to produce real psychological and political crises.

The authors engage seriously with questions of complicity and harm that typically remain unexamined in revolutionary fiction. Eve’s character—a trans woman whose economic precarity drives her into state service—complicates simplistic narratives of collaboration. As she rationalizes, “Without it she’d be just another unemployed trans woman, unable to support her polycule.” This acknowledgment of structural violence forcing marginalized people into compromised positions adds nuance often absent from resistance narratives. Similarly, December’s backstory involving an ex-girlfriend cop who “grew up in a violent family” and joined the force hoping to help others gestures toward the complex motivations that sustain oppressive systems.

The debate over acceptable collateral damage forms the story’s ethical crux. When the troupe argues about killing the senator’s family, Kitty’s objection—”We won’t just be play-acting terrorists, we’ll be…”—hangs unfinished, the ellipsis carrying the weight of a line they’re about to cross. December’s response—”Right-wingers are allowed acceptable collateral… Why aren’t we?”—articulates a moral equivalence that the story presents without endorsement or condemnation, forcing readers to grapple with asymmetric warfare’s brutal logic.

Form and Style

The narrative employs a multi-perspectival structure that fragments between Michael, the troupe, and Eve, with temporal shifts creating a recursive loop where causes and effects interchange. This formal choice mirrors the story’s thematic concern with mediated reality and surveillance’s distorting effects. The opening scene’s impact derives from our sharing Michael’s limited perspective—we experience the bus shooting as real before learning it’s performance, replicating the epistemological uncertainty the troupe weaponizes.

The authors’ prose style oscillates between clinical precision when describing surveillance technology and intimate character moments rendered in close third person. Technical passages—”The burst of gunfire bleaches his screen white”—employ synesthesia to convey the visceral impact of mediated violence, while scenes like December’s conversation with Kitty about trauma demonstrate psychological acuity: “Does it bother you that she’s sending people like us into places like that?… More importantly, does it bother her?”

Point of view shifts serve both practical and thematic functions. Michael’s section establishes the surveillance apparatus’s dehumanizing logic through details like his coworker Luce calling “the FBI on a Sikh funeral procession.” The troupe sections reveal the labor and craft of resistance—December’s observation that “fake brain-meat always puts me in the mood for burgers” humanizes revolutionaries often rendered as ideological abstractions. Eve’s sections complicate reader sympathy by alternating between her professional competence (“Already she’s switched control to the sentinels”) and her personal life (checking messages from Kitty).

Symbolism operates primarily through technological mediation. The AR-shroud that makes performers “look like a spouse, an ex, whoever” literalizes surveillance capitalism’s use of personal data to manipulate behavior. The prop bus covered in fake blood advertising The Turner Diaries “direct from Broadway” offers biting commentary on fascism’s mainstreaming and commodification. The story’s climactic image—terrorists standing up after being “killed,” waving at drones before cutting the feed—visualizes resistance’s spectral persistence.

Characterization

Character development follows different trajectories across the three narrative strands. Michael functions primarily as audience surrogate, his limited appearance serving to establish the Watchers’ psychological toll. His physical response to violence—vomiting across his workstation—registers viscerally but leaves him more sketch than character.

The troupe members receive varying degrees of interiority. December emerges as the story’s most fully realized figure, their theatrical background and manipulative skills balanced against genuine care for troupe members. The scene where they comfort Kitty while simultaneously steering her toward the mission (“Good girl… You’ve got this”) demonstrates their capacity for instrumental relationships without entirely negating their empathy. Zephyr’s pronouns (xe/xer) are integrated naturally, and Rosa’s manic energy (“talking rapid-fire about a new yuri anime”) provides texture, though both remain somewhat functional within the ensemble.

Kitty’s arc from enthusiastic newcomer to morally compromised operative carries significant weight. Her hesitation about the senator’s family—”What if he’s like me?”—and final bitter capitulation—”I fucking hate the way you’re always right”—trace a trajectory toward radicalization that refuses triumphalism. The story doesn’t celebrate her acceptance of collateral damage; it presents it as tragic necessity or moral failure, depending on reader interpretation.

Eve represents the story’s most complex characterization challenge: rendering sympathetic a character who drone-strikes queer anarchists. The authors handle this through strategic withholding and revelation. Her initial introduction emphasizes professional competence and economic precarity. The bookshop raid’s clinical narration—”She squeezes the relevant trigger… one of the targets drop”—initially positions her as efficient operative. Only gradually do we learn the targets are “queer terrorists” with “a small, unlicensed gun range in the basement for women and queers of every stripe,” reframing the scene’s moral valence. Her final realization—”What have I done?”—followed immediately by “before she remembers everything is being recorded”—suggests both genuine horror and performative damage control, leaving her ultimate psychological state ambiguous.

Historical and Cultural Context

“Crisis Actors” participates in several overlapping literary and cultural conversations. It extends the tradition of surveillance fiction from Orwell through Philip K. Dick to contemporary writers like Cory Doctorow and Malka Older, while incorporating queer and trans perspectives often marginalized in that lineage. The story’s engagement with police abolition and prison abolition movements positions it within what Dan Hassler-Forest terms “activist SF”—speculative fiction explicitly designed to intervene in political struggles.

The title’s appropriation of right-wing conspiracy rhetoric exemplifies what Linda Hutcheon calls “historiographic metafiction”—self-reflexive fiction that interrogates historical narratives. By literalizing the “crisis actor” conspiracy theory while inverting its political valence, the authors expose the projection inherent in fascist paranoia: the fear that victims are performing serves to justify preemptive violence against them.

The story’s near-future setting extrapolates from contemporary surveillance technologies and political trends—the “Omniscience Network” extending Ring doorbell networks and police camera access programs, the “Department for a Safe America” echoing Department of Homeland Security rhetoric. The casual mention that Donald Trump won the 2024 election (per the story’s future setting) and references to “dominionist rhetoric” situate the narrative within specific anxieties about American authoritarianism.

Theoretically, the story invites reading through multiple critical lenses. A Marxist approach might emphasize the troupe’s analysis of complicity through economic relations—Eve’s precarity making her “another unemployed trans woman” without state employment. Queer theory illuminates how surveillance regimes particularly target LGBTQ+ people, as when Watchers are instructed to “hit blue for the police” when seeing “queers, anyone else suspicious-looking.” Baudrillard’s simulacra theory resonates with the story’s concern with copies without originals—fake terrorism producing real state violence producing real deaths.

The story also engages with what Jackie Wang calls “carceral capitalism”—the intersection of racial capitalism and mass incarceration extended through predictive policing and algorithmic governance. The Watchers’ instruction to call ICE for “a bunch of immigrants” or FBI for “Muslims” literalizes the racialized sorting that surveillance systems automate. The machine learning algorithms that “had no sense of context, labeling a street hockey game as a possible riot” critique the epistemological violence of reducing human behavior to data points.

Evaluation

“Crisis Actors” succeeds most powerfully in its refusal of political comfort. Unlike much activist fiction that provides cathartic revolutionary triumph, this story ends in moral and tactical ambiguity. The troupe has successfully manipulated state violence into killing a senator, but the “acceptable collateral” includes his children. December’s declaration that this is “the start of the end” reads as either revolutionary optimism or delusional justification. Charlii’s possession of “all the footage, all the evidence” and Zephyr’s suggestion to “release our planning, our procedures” gestures toward propaganda of the deed, but the story offers no guarantees about political impact.

The characterization, while occasionally schematic, generally avoids reducing figures to mouthpieces. Eve’s complexity—trans woman, polyamorous, economically precarious, state functionary, mass murderer—resists simple categorization. Her relationship with Kitty, grooming disguised as mentorship, demonstrates how state violence reproduces through interpersonal relations. The story’s willingness to show December manipulating Kitty’s trauma for operational purposes acknowledges that revolutionary movements can replicate harmful dynamics they oppose.

Stylistically, the prose occasionally sacrifices subtlety for clarity—December’s speeches sometimes read as position papers—but this didacticism serves the story’s activist intentions. The technical descriptions of surveillance apparatus and drone warfare demonstrate research that grounds the speculative elements in plausible extrapolation. The dialogue generally convinces, particularly in capturing the troupe’s blend of ideological commitment and mundane social interaction (“They don’t give cops free food, so we’ll probably be fine”).

The story’s weaknesses emerge primarily in pacing and proportion. Michael’s perspective, while providing crucial initial misdirection, feels underdeveloped compared to the troupe and Eve sections. The middle section’s focus on the Eve honeypot operation, while thematically important, somewhat stalls narrative momentum. Some secondary troupe members (Rosa, Gillian) remain thinly sketched despite repeated appearances.

The ending’s ambiguity constitutes either strength or weakness depending on readerly expectations. Those seeking clear moral judgment or revolutionary triumph may find it frustratingly open. However, this refusal of closure mirrors the story’s political argument: that resistance under totalitarian surveillance requires ethically compromised actions whose ultimate consequences remain unknowable. The final exchange—December’s “if it means revolution” answered by Kitty’s earlier “I fucking hate the way you’re always right”—leaves readers suspended between revolutionary necessity and moral catastrophe.

Conclusion

“Crisis Actors” represents a significant contribution to politically engaged speculative fiction, offering a sophisticated meditation on surveillance, state violence, and resistance ethics that refuses easy answers. Stoff and White construct a narrative that forces readers to grapple with uncomfortable questions about complicity, collateral damage, and revolutionary violence without providing comfortable resolutions. The story’s formal structure—its fragmented perspectives and recursive temporality—mirrors its thematic concerns with mediated reality and epistemological uncertainty under total surveillance.

While characterization occasionally lapses into functionality and didactic passages sometimes overwhelm subtlety, these represent strategic choices as much as limitations. The story’s activist origins and contest sponsorship position it explicitly as intervention rather than mere representation, and its provocations serve political as well as literary purposes.

The work’s enduring relevance seems assured given accelerating surveillance infrastructure, algorithmic governance, and debates about protest tactics and state violence. As surveillance capitalism and carceral systems expand, “Crisis Actors” offers a thought experiment about resistance that acknowledges both the moral costs of revolutionary action and the moral impossibility of complicity with oppression. Future scholarship might productively examine the story alongside other contemporary activist SF, explore its relationship to prison abolition and police abolition movements, or analyze its queer and trans perspectives on surveillance and resistance.

Ultimately, “Crisis Actors” succeeds not despite but through its discomforting refusal of political or narrative closure. By forcing readers to inhabit multiple perspectives within a surveillance state—victim, observer, operative, revolutionary—it enacts the epistemological and ethical complexities it describes. The story’s final image of actors standing after being killed, waving at drones before disappearing, perfectly encapsulates its vision of resistance: spectral, mediated, uncertain of impact, but persisting nonetheless.