Introduction

"POST-APOCALYPTIC FICTION has been moved to our Current Affairs section." Written on a chalkboard outside the Bookloft bookstore in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on Wednesday morning just after the last U. S. presidential election, Zazu Galdos-Schapiro's witticism was instant meme material. Like all good jokes, her line flashed electric between id and insight, a short-circuit buzz that made us chuckle. A couple of years later, we're no longer laughing, yet the challenge remains: if speculative fiction has indeed sublimated into document, critique, and analysis, well then, it's high time to take it seriously. Peer publications like the Boston Review, with their "Global Dystopias" issue, have already begun such work; in these pages, the prose we publish offers a panoply of spec fic, mostly mixed blends of fantasy and sci-fi. Lit mags have a reputation for snobbery when it comes to genre, we know, but the best have always been interested in everything. I know I am (and, after all, teaching in a department that long had the honor of employing Samuel R. Delany does confer certain obligations). We perhaps read and write dystopian fiction mainly as scaramanzia: knocking on wood, we say it so it will not happen, even if it's happening now. And it is happening now.

Our fall issue also features an amazing triptych: nine translations from Catalan, of which three shrewd fables by Pere Calders, elegantly rendered by Mara Faye Lethem, connect most clearly with our speculative theme. Currently confronting its own form of dystopia, Catalonia has both a history and a present of resistance; selections from the Civil War journals of C. A. Jordana give us an unforgettable glimpse into this past, and three excerpts from a novel by Najat El Hachmi illuminate life as an immigrant in its troubled present. Once again, we have contributing editor Peter Bush to thank for bringing these two masterful storytellers into English. Together with the magic of Lethem's Calders, we see how, within a single literary tradition, imagination, history, and identity fuse in a twenty-first-century nation.

Anthropologists have long sorted cultures on the basis of kinship practices; thus, it stands to reason that family relations are at the center of most writing of dystopia or utopia. In this issue, Eric Schlich's "Journal of a Cyclops" and Caitlin O'Neil's "Gen XX" focus on family directly, and related themes arise in stories by John Baum and Jill Maio, and in a lovely coming-of-age tale by Laura Willwerth. A tale by Gabriella Kuruvilla (brought to us from Italy, in a translation by Giovanna Bellesia and Victoria Poletto) offers an intimate, realist view of mixed-race parentage in an era of resurgent white supremacy. Essays by Laure Katsaros, on the Fourier-loving pharmacist who modeled for Flaubert, and Robert Crossley, on the woman warrior at the heart of Scandinavian saga, demonstrate the depth and breadth of utopian imagination within the literary canon. Finally, GennaRose Nethercott's fantastic menagerie of beastly creations and Mika Seifert's incisive tale of unrelenting enlightenment offer unblended examples of fantasy and dystopia, something for those who prefer their genres pure.

So where are the poets in all this? Taking care of business, as they should, and founding our fictions in close observation. As Stuart Greenhouse comments, "it is a political act to simply observe the body politic and the environment . . . for what it is." Michael Lavers offers two Pascalian meditations, and Leah Poole Osowski pens one of three poems published here with a colon in the title (genus: species may have itself become a genre of poetry). Elsewhere Chen Chen manages, once again, to merge the everyday and the marvelous, whereas Emma Bolden takes her inspiration from the headlines, unrelentingly awful as they are. In times like these, it's hard to say if we'll have more need of Jody Winer's guardian angel school or for Henry Lyman's pugilist.

One thing we do know, however: it can't continue like this. Ward Schumaker's stunning, stenciled compilation of vile, adolescent POTUS talk makes that clear. What art claims it also transforms...