“Well,” Bob said at last, “I suppose I have to ask. What do you think of the Revolution?”

“It always reminds me,” I said, “of something Marx said about the French state: how all the revolutions have ‘perfected this machine, instead of smashing it’.”

Bob yelped with laughter. “Fuck, yeah! But trust you to come up with a Marx quote. You were always a bit of a wanker in that respect.”

I laughed too, and we took some time to reminisce and catch up.

Bob was a science-fiction fan, an occasional SF editor, and an anarchist, but none of these paid his bills. He was an anthropology professor at a Catholic university deep in the Bible Belt. He spent very little time propagating the ideas of anarchism, even in the days when that had been safe—‘wanker’ and ‘hobbyist’ were among his kinder terms for ideologues. Instead, he worked with trade union locals, small business forums, free software start-ups, and tribal guerrillas in Papua New Guinea. This was all anthropological research, or so he claimed. Such groups tended to be more effective after he’d worked with them.

I hadn’t thought much about him over the years, to be honest—we were never exactly close—but when I had, I’d wondered how he was doing under the new order in the United States. Not too well, by the sound of things. Still, it would probably have been worse for him if I’d emailed to ask. This thought helped to quash my pang of guilt about not having kept in touch.

“Hey,” Bob was saying, “wait a minute—you must know some of these writers!”

I nodded.

“Maybe you could give me some contact details?”

At that moment I began to suspect that we hadn’t met by accident.

“I don’t know if I can,” I said.

I had the numbers of most of the writers Bob was looking for on my mobile. “But,” I went on, “I do know where you can find them tomorrow morning. Every SF writer in Paris, I shouldn’t wonder.”