“People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it.”
—Ray Bradbury
After seventeen years of editing a science fiction magazine, I’m awfully familiar with stories that offer dire predictions of the future. The post office box abounded in them—they’re one of the four or five most consistent themes I saw in story submissions.
In fact, when my friend John Joseph Adams assembled an excellent anthology of dystopian stories, Brave New Words, I was bemused to notice that twenty percent of the stories in it were tales I had published. (No wonder I consider the book to be excellent, right?) I guess I have a taste for such tales.
So, when I had lunch with John Oakes on Inauguration Day, 2017, it was not shocking that the concept for this book should arise. Perhaps the bigger surprise was that I hadn’t thought of it sooner. The atmosphere had been thick with dire predictions.
In forming this book, I deliberately sought a lot of short pieces, rather than a handful of longer ones (as in my anthology of climate change stories). There are so many alarming trends at play right now that I reckoned three dozen short considerations of them would make for a better book than ten to twelve longer ones.
When you get to reading this book, I think you’ll agree this approach was fruitful.
As you would expect from the title, the stories assembled here do not include many escapist fantasies. Happy endings are scarce in these pages. The stories gathered here are angry, bold, snarky, defiant, nervous, and satiric. They reflect a lot of anxiety. They cover a lot of the themes you’d expect and perhaps a few you might not.
I like to think that readers of any political stripe will find this book interesting, but fans of our forty-fifth president will definitely be put out by some of these stories. A lot of these stories, actually. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
In the United States, the political divide between members of the two major parties has, in my estimation, grown wider and deeper over the last three or four decades. This book will not narrow that gap or heal that divide—at least, not in the short term. It’s more a work of resistance. As Ursula Le Guin noted, “Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.”
In the long term, I hope this resistance will give way to understanding. I hope that it will encourage some cooperation to take root and grow.
Mostly, though, I think this book will make for a lot of thoughtful and valuable reading. I hope you’ll agree.
—Gordon Van Gelder
November 2017