CZM Book Club: Where the Phph Pebbles Go, by Miriam Allen DeFord

In this episode of the Cool Zone Media Book Club, host Margaret Kilgheim reads and dissects 'Where the Puff-Puff Pebbles Go' by feminist socialist science fiction writer Miriam Allen DeFord, a 1963 story originally published in Worlds of Tomorrow! The narrative unfolds on a planet where two dominant 'real people' compete in a game called Puff-Puff, hurling pebbles toward the horizon, while the subjugated 'ground dwellers' serve as spectators and laborers. The story takes a sharp turn when a thinker—a member of a ruling intellectual elite—attends the game, sparking chaos among the elite and revealing a deep-seated fear of external contact. The thinker reveals that pebbles thrown into space may have been detected by alien civilizations, prompting a covert plan to replace natural pebbles with artificial ones that carry false, dangerous signals to deter any potential invasion. Kilgheim frames the story as a biting satire of colonialism, class stratification, and the paranoid logic of the 'Dark Forest' theory—where civilizations must destroy any others that might threaten them. She praises DeFord for anticipating the themes of Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem decades earlier, highlighting the story’s radical feminist and socialist undercurrents. The episode closes with a call to action for listeners to read Ursula K. Le Guin’s 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas' and 'The Day Before the Revolution' for the next book club session, inviting engagement via Reddit.