What am I doing?
This is the question that plagues me, as it does many people, when I hear about the latest atrocity or injustice that I feel I am powerless to change. What am I contributing? Do I even have anything to contribute? It is a Sisyphean task just keeping myself from losing all hope for the future, let alone doing something about it. Dwelling on harsh realities seems unnecessarily cynical, whereas dreaming of a brighter life seems naively optimistic—and yet both are necessary in order to make any kind of change. How can one hold two opposing truths at once?
In the introduction to We Will Rise Again, Annalee Newitz states that the idea for this book came from their “seemingly contradictory desire for data-driven rigor and fantastical transcendence” (p. 1). Along with their fellow editors Karen Lord and Malka Older, they sought to create a book that engages with this dialectic: unrestricted imagination and practical, concrete considerations about scientific reality and historical forces. From this dialectic arises a kind of speculative fiction that manages to be both informed by the present and inspired by the future. The result is a thought-provoking, polyphonic collage which manages to engage authentically with nuanced issues while also leaving the reader feeling optimistic and empowered.
In the Introduction, the editors identify this genre, of activism-oriented concepts explored through a speculative lens, as “visionary fiction.” The term “visionary fiction” was created by Walidah Imarisha and Morrigan Phillips for an issue of the magazine Left Turn themed around activism-oriented speculative fiction. Imarisha then partnered with adrienne maree brown to compile an anthology of such stories, inspired by Octavia Butler’s prescient visions of the future. Octavia’s Brood, published by AK Press in 2015, was the first self-proclaimed book of visionary fiction to reach shelves. We Will Rise Again takes a similar approach to the form, pairing writers with activists who could help inform and shape the story based on their lived experience. The writers come from a wide variety of backgrounds in terms of identity, national origin, and field of work. Additionally, the book itself is not comprised entirely of fiction. Though most of the pieces are short stories, they are interspersed with essays and interviews, all proximate to the topics of change and justice. Even the short stories are accompanied by a brief end note tying them to real-world crises, thus synthesizing fiction and non-fiction and blurring the line between the real and unreal. One may expect end notes that explain the significance of a work to come across as didactic, but instead they serve to expand the scope of a story by displaying not only its inspiration but by citing other situations in which the concepts in the story could be applied. By collecting many voices and showcasing those voices in many forms, We Will Rise Again creates a heteroglossic collage of radical perspectives.
The connective tissue holding these stories together, beyond just their forward-looking approach, is an acceptance and appreciation of the messiness that accompanies change. There is no one right way to protest—and often, even within a movement of people who are ideologically aligned, there’s conflict about tactics and principles. The story that most clearly exemplifies this common thread is “The Rise and Fall of Storm Bluff, Kansas: An Oral History” by Izzy Wasserstein. This epistolary story, formed from snippets of confessionals with the lead character, tells the history of an anarchist commune that sprang up in Kansas, only to be ruthlessly attacked by a far-right militia and eventually the police. In a tapestry of first-person accounts that formally mimics the patchwork nature of the collection, characters illustrate both the joys and inherent disorder of anarchism. In the words of one character, “It was magical. But it was always messy” (p. 231). Even after the brutalization, arrests, and deaths of many of their comrades, the architects of Storm Bluff do not regret their experiment in communal living. The story provides a crucial reminder for everyone involved in activist circles: Not everyone with the same dream will agree on how to achieve it, but the only way to make progress is to accept and embrace the disorder that often comes with an openness to many perspectives. Participating in such work requires a level of adaptability, because once you acknowledge the fact that the “right choice” is a moving target, you must be able to shift your aim. Rigidity is simply not an option when it comes to living in community with each other.
In the same vein, “Where Memory Meets the Sea” by Laia Asieo Odo (a nom de plume taken from a Le Guin novel) is another story which encapsulates the instability and uncertainty that the anthology embraces. The story begins in a place of constant change: The center of the action is the shoreline. The sea, much like a nascent social movement or a violent conflict, is an ever-shifting thing, inherently unstable. The shoreline is an uncertain boundary between land and sea, but also an uncertain border between nations. For this reason, in the story the shoreline is the only place where memory blockers—devices that erase traumatic memories, ostensibly to protect people from their own recollection—cease to function. A community of people who refuse to be robbed of their past therefore meet regularly at the shoreline to remember what they have lived through, knowing that the moment they leave the sea they will forget again. Still, they keep returning, stealing snatches of grief in order to heal in a fragmented, incremental manner. When the narrator, Ariadne, witnesses an injustice that she knows the blocker will soon delete, she fights to retain the memory of a deceased friend, sparking an international social movement in the process. Ariadne’s revolution, then, is not one of violent unrest—it is one of history, preservation, and the pursuit of truth.
Like Ariadne, many of the characters in the stories of We Will Rise Again find revolution in unexpected places, or realize it with unexpected tactics. In “One of the Lesser-Known Revelations” by Newitz themself, a woman who faced constant threats of violence after being doxxed finds community and comfort in a group of privacy activists who help each other with chat moderation in online spaces. “Blockbuster” by Kelly Robson explores a near-future Toronto in which teams of street burlesque performers affect social change by drawing attention to activist movements, like prison abolition. In “Realer Than Real” by Charlie Jane Anders, a group of trans friends demonstrate the absurdity of laws that require them to dress in a manner conforming with their assigned sex through malicious compliance—donning Georgian-era costumes, illustrating the arbitrary nature of gendered fashion. An interview with activists L. A. Kauffman and Andrea Dehlendorf mentions a 1998 protest that involved releasing crickets into a real estate auction to prevent the sale of a New York City community garden. Ursula Vernon’s essay showcases how gardeners who cultivate heirloom vegetables “end up saving a small piece of the world” by preserving species that would otherwise be lost (p. 120).
On the whole, this collection of (seemingly) unlikely heroes and tactics makes for an inclusive picture of what protest might look like. It constitutes another crucial reminder for activist circles: There are many roles to play in a revolution; very few of those roles tend to be glamorized, but that doesn’t make them any less valuable. As a disabled person, this message was incredibly important to me. It’s so easy to believe that, when you don’t have the same physical abilities as others, you are a burden on the community instead of an asset. These stories reinforce the notion that activism can take an infinite variety of forms. Everyone has something to contribute, and everyone deserves to be uplifted by the community.
We Will Rise Again manages to hold many apparent contradictions within its pages. It is empowering without being saccharine, honest without being pessimistic, and heteroglossic while presenting a unified vision. The messiness is what makes it such a powerful piece of literature. As a reader of speculative fiction and a believer in activism, I look forward to seeing where the emergent genre of visionary fiction goes from here. It represents a movement towards a more collaborative horizon of global voices, a world of speculative fiction that synthesizes many perspectives, forms, and genres. In the words of Fredric Jameson (the go-to scholar on utopic thinking), “Our imaginations are hostage to our own mode of production … at best Utopia can serve the negative purpose of making us more aware of our mental and ideological imprisonment.” By imagining a future that could be, any speculative fiction draws attention to the conditions of the present. However, visionary fiction takes this a step further by pulling together so many writers.
Walidah Imarisha says in the introduction to We Will Rise Again, “There were so many people doing this work, but we were scattered … there was a notion that dreaming was not serious business, and that it was taking away from the real work” (p. 7). Visionary fiction fuses the “real work” with the dreaming, the present with the future, the mundane and the numinous. It also fuses many stories into one complex weave of narrative. Dreaming, in fact, is serious business—especially dreaming of change. Indeed, change is—as Octavia Butler once said—the only lasting truth.
If you, too, find yourself often asking, “What can I do to help?”, We Will Rise Again reminds you that the answer is always the same: more than you think.