Science and Speculative Fiction has long been a way to explore other ways of existence, as well as a way to think about current moments through alternative lenses. In 2021 AK press, a worker-run, collectively managed anarchist small press that aims to “expand minds and change worlds,” launched Black Dawn, a series of speculative fiction titles with the publication of adrienne maree brown’s first fiction title, Grievers. First in a trilogy, Grievers, is set in a near-future Detroit devastated by a mysterious illness that puts people into a coma-like state from which they never recover, eventually known as Syndrome H-8. Over the course of the three novels, Dune, a young woman whose mother is patient zero for the mysterious syndrome, navigates a city crippled with grief for all that has been lost, the emergence of community and hope amidst the ruins (Maroons, 2023), and an eventual flourishing that grapples with the tension between shelter and freedom (Ancestors, 2025).
Also published in Black Dawn’s launch year was Margaret Killjoy’s stand-alone A Country of Ghosts, which follows a cynical journalist from an imperial country who is sent to report from the front lines of war where he must confront the realities of colonialist expansion and the difference between fighting for resources and fighting for your very existence. In addition to the second of brown’s trilogy, Maroons, AK Press published Inversion by Aric McBay in 2023, a mind-bending tale of invasion and first contact and the first in the Germinal trilogy. 22-year-old Char of the Ami lives a peaceful, nomadic life centered on community and governed only by the cyclical firewall that both devastates and renews. The arrival of strangers from outside their world upsets Char’s precisely balanced ecosystem in ways that will alter the very fabric of her reality. Keep an eye out for the sequel, Recursion, coming this June.
In the early days of the new year, as we traditionally look for inspiration to change amidst new and continued horrors, each of these titles offer examples of radical new ways of being and living in the world.
~posted by V.