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Adam Vahn on Substack
Adam Vahn
on Substack.
Stories, essays, excerpts, and the political machinery behind the work—published where readers can reply, argue, and stay for the next signal.
Open the Substack ↗What lives here
A public
reading room.
Adam Vahn's Substack publishes complete short stories, long-form essays, excerpts, and behind-the-scenes work readers can discuss and share.
How We Took Canada
A standalone story set in the alternate North America of Proofs of Empire. No prior reading required.
Read on Substack ↗02Short storyThe Man Nobody Could Bury
A man dies on Monday night. By Tuesday morning, the county's systems insist he is alive and driving west.
Read on Substack ↗03EssayThe Machinery of Catastrophe
A look at declarations, administrative certainty, and what catastrophe feels like from inside the plan.
Read on Substack ↗04Field noteI Did Not Become a Writer According to Plan
A note about the road into fiction—and the political and institutional machinery behind the stories.
Read on Substack ↗The author's field note
Move the machinery
into the light.
“Fiction lets me take a political structure, move it far enough away to make it visible, and then put a person back inside it.”
The essays extend that method without explaining away the stories. They trace a pressure, a historical parallel, a research question, or a piece of institutional language—and stop before the machinery beneath a novel is spoiled.
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