Search Worlds Without End

Whenever we envision a world without war, prisons, or capitalism, we are producing speculative fiction. Organizers and activists envision, and try to create, such worlds all the time. Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown have brought 20 of them together in the first anthology of short stories to explore the connections between radical speculative fiction and movements for social change. These visionary tales span genres--sci-fi, fantasy, horror, magical realism--but all are united by an attempt to inject a healthy dose of imagination and innovation into our political practice and to try on new ways of understanding ourselves, the world around us, and all the selves and worlds that could be. Also features essays by Tananarive Due and Mumia Abu-Jamal, and a preface by Sheree Renée Thomas.

Table of Contents:

• 1 - Foreword: Birth of a Revolution - essay by Sheree Renée Thomas
• 3 - Introduction (Octavia's Brood) - essay by Walidah Imarisha
• 7 - Revolution Shuffle - short story by Bao Phi
• 15 - The Token Superhero - short story by David F. Walker
• 23 - The River - short story by Adrienne Maree Brown
• 33 - Evidence - short story by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
• 43 - Black Angel - short story by Walidah Imarisha
• 56 - The Long Memory (map) - interior artwork by Melanie Hardy
• 56 - The Long Memory - short story by Morrigan Phillips
• 79 - Small and Bright - short story by Autumn Brown
• 89 - In Spite of Darkness - short story by Alixa Garcia
• 90 - Ó - interior artwork by Alixa Garcia
• 93 - Jaiku - interior artwork by Alixa Garcia
• 94 - Cominó - interior artwork by Alixa Garcia
• 97 - Sol Gatherer - interior artwork by Alixa Garcia
• 109 - Hollow - short story by Mia Mingus
• 123 - Lalibela - short story by Gabriel Teodros
• 135 - Little Brown Mouse - short story by Tunde Olaniran
• 145 - Sanford and Sun - short story by Dawolu Jabari Anderson
• 167 - Runway Blackout - short story by Tara Betts
• 177 - Kafka's Last Laugh - short story by Vagabond
• 187 - 22XX: One-Shot - short story by Jelani Wilson
• 197 - Manhunters - short story by Kalamu ya Salaam
• 215 - Aftermath (excerpt) - (1997) - short fiction by LeVar Burton
• 225 - Fire on the Mountain (excerpt) - (2009) - short fiction by Terry Bisson
• 239 - Homing Instinct - short story by Dani McClain
• 249 - Children Who Fly - short story by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
• 255 - Star Wars and the American Imagination - essay by Mumia Abu-Jamal
• 259 - The Only Lasting Truth: The Theme of Change in the Works of Octavia E. Butler - essay by Tananarive Due
• 279 - Outro (Octavia's Brood) - essay by Adrienne Maree Brown

Grievers is the story of a city so plagued by grief that it can no longer function.

Dune's mother is patient zero of a mysterious illness that stops people in their tracks--in mid-sentence, mid-action, mid-life--casting them into a nonresponsive state from which no one recovers. Dune must navigate poverty and the loss of her mother as Detroit's hospitals, morgues, and graveyards begin to overflow. As the quarantined city slowly empties of life, she investigates what caused the plague, and what might end it, following in the footsteps of her late researcher father, who has a physical model of Detroit's history and losses set up in their basement. She dusts it off and begins tracking the sick and dying, discovering patterns, finding comrades in curiosity, conspiracies for the fertile ground of the city, and the unexpected magic that emerges when the debt of grief is cleared.

A tale of survival, of moving beyond seemingly insurmountable devastation toward, if not hope itself, then the road to hope...

The pandemic of Syndrome H-8 continues to ravage the city of Detroit and everyone in Dune's life. In Maroons, she must learn what community and connection mean in the lonely wake of a fatal virus. Emerging from grief to follow a subtle path of small pleasures through an abandoned urban landscape, she begins finding other unlikely survivors with little in common but the will to live. Together they begin to piece together the puzzle of their survival, and that of the city itself.