Dear Earthlings,
We would like to express our gratitude to having every one of you here sharing this space with us, participating in the community we hope to foster with these imagined futures. Ultimately, our purpose is to nurture a community of readers, and we are truly grateful to have you give meaning to our work!
This magazine comes from a place of yearning, a desire for something new. Something to delight as well as prescribe a way forward – in the fictional worlds and our own. Author adrienne maree brown speaks in her book Emergent Strategy, referring to speculative fiction as a strategy “to shape the futures we want to live,” to talk of those who strive, “To apply natural order and our love of life to the ways we create the next world. To tap into the most ancient systems and patterns for wisdom as we build tomorrow.” What we wanted was a zine that achieves this: a place where art meets activism.
Our one requirement for contributors was for stories that are speculative in nature. Speculative is defined by many people in many ways, but we work under an umbrella that includes Fantasy, Sci-fi, Horror, Magical Realism, and the like. And though we only gave them this call to action each of our contributors felt called to imagine better futures for our planet. Seemingly fated happenings like these are precisely why we named the magazine Kismet.
We have put together this collection of pieces that span a diverse range of genres and styles. Our contributors have smithed stories that explore options for keeping a sentient species alive, imagine rehabilitating a planet and dealing with those in power who become complacent, cherish nature and the animism it takes on, and create a world where refugees co-exist with the ecosystem they work to integrate with.
The works featured range from poetry to flash fiction, from solarpunk to romance. Here you will find offerings from a medley of authors, styles, and geographic locations. At the core of this zine, though, you will find a community of people—real, living, loving people who have come together to break the mold, proposing questions about the world through art and discussing the ripples those questions create.
We are indebted to the authors who did the good writing before us. Those like Octavia E. Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, Grace Dillon, adrienne maree brown, and many others have shown us all paths forward and started the task of shaping a better future.
We invite you to sit with this issue for as long as you would like. Then, when you’re ready, pass it on. Discuss it with a friend. Come find the rest of us, wherever we may be, and work to bring these imagined realities to life. As always, you can find our community here in these pages, on Instagram, X, Substack, and our Discord server. Thanks so much for reading!
In Community,
M. J. Woods
Editor-in-Chief
Reading List:
If you would like to connect this issue with the larger world of writing here is our suggested reading list. This is a mix of things that were mentioned in the issue and also other works with similar themes.
- Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown
- The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed
- The Past is Red by Catherynne M. Valente
- The Barricade by Joyce Ch’ng
- Inciting Joy by Ross Gay
- Book of Delights by Ross Gay
- Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers
- Candide by Voltaire
- Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki
- The Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
- A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys
- The Wind’s Twelve Quarters by Ursula K. Le Guin
- The Care Manifesto by The Care Collective