Speculative Fiction for Dreamers: A Latinx Anthology

by Alex Hernandez (Editor), Matthew David Goodwin (Editor), Sarah Rafael García (Editor)

Overview

"An outstanding showcase of contemporary Latinx authors exploring identity through the conventions of sci-fi, fantasy, and magical realism. Themes of family, migration, and community resonate throughout these 38 masterful stories. ... This is a knockout." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Finalist, 2022 World Fantasy Awards
Finalist, 2022 Ignyte Awards
Finalist, 2022 Utopia Awards

In a tantalizing array of new works from some of the most exciting Latinx creators working in the speculative vein today, Speculative Fiction for Dreamers extends the project begun with a previous anthology, Latinx Rising (The Ohio State University Press, 2020), to showcase a new generation of writers. Spanning diverse forms, settings, perspectives, and styles, but unified by their drive to imagine new Latinx futures, these stories address the breadth of contemporary Latinx experiences and identities while exuberantly embracing the genre's ability to entertain and surprise. With new work for new audiences in their teens and up, and especially for Latinx people navigating their identities in the ever-shifting, sometimes perilous, but always promising cultural landscape of the US, this book is for dreamers--and DREAMers--everywhere.

Contributors: Grisel Y. Acosta, Stephanie Adams-Santos, Frederick Luis Aldama, William Alexander, Nicholas Belardes, Louangie Bou-Montes, Lisa M. Bradley, Eliana Buenrostro, Diana Burbano, Pedro Cabiya, Steve Castro, Fernando de Peña, Scott Russell Duncan, Samy Figaredo, Tammy Melody Gomez, J. M. Guzman, Ernest Hogan, Pedro Iniguez, Ezzy G. Languzzi, Patrick Lugo, Roxanne Ocasio, Daniel Parada, Stephanie Nina Pitsirilos, Reyes Ramirez, Julia Rios, Sara Daniele Rivera, Roman Sanchez, Tabitha Sin, Alex Temblador, Rodrigo Vargas, Laura Villareal, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Karlo Yeager Rodriguez

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814257982
Publisher:	Ohio State University Press
Publication date:	09/08/2021
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	1,024,970
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Alex Hernandez is a Cuban American science fiction writer. His work often explores themes of migration, colonization, and posthumanism, while blending the subgenres of space opera and biopunk. His first novel, Tooth and Talon, was published by EDGE. He lives in South Florida with his wife and two daughters.

Sarah Rafael García is the author of Las Niñas and SanTana's Fairy Tales. She is also the founder of Barrio Writers and LibroMobile as well as coeditor of the anthology Pariahs.

Matthew David Goodwin is a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. His work focuses on the ways that science fiction, fantasy, and digital culture have been used to express the experience of migration. He is the editor of Latinx Rising and the author of The Latinx Files: Race, Migration, and Space Aliens.

Read an Excerpt

The alternative realities constructed by the many Latinx creators that make up Speculative Fiction for Dreamers step to the challenge of the speculative. They build storyworlds that imagine anew the future, and past, for Latinx subjects otherwise erased, ignored, or swept to shadowed corners. They create Latinx characters with entirely new affective and cognitive systems—and who shed conventional straitjackets of identity. They are creators of the speculative hailing from those otherwise identified extraterrestrial spaces. They are our dreamers of tomorrow.

These new gen Latinx creators build a whole range of storyworlds: from those filled with robots and high-tech, to those that reflect on new ways to relate to one another, to our communities, and to our planet, all while waking us to current toxic racist, masculinist, sexist, neoliberal practices. They choose to build storyworlds to revise yesterday, present an alternate present, or reimagine the future. For some Latinx creators, there needs to be a total reset for us to see critically our current destructive patterns: intersectional oppression and trauma. In others, it is the reimagining of our indigenous pasts and mythologies that clears affirmative intersectional spaces where we are allowed to blossom anew. For other Latinx dreamers, old tech can be refashioned into new tech respectful of culture, tradition, and people—a space to celebrate new ways of existing outside of nonbinary race, gender, and sexuality conventions.

As we face a reality that seems increasingly unbearable—climate change, border patrolling, children caged, families ripped apart—the space of the speculative seems more and more a place of reprieve for us Latinxs. It’s also more and more a space for us to see a way out of these quagmirical, gelatinous masses. Speculative Fiction for Dreamers is testament to how the creative, mindful use of our counterfactual capacity today can imagine better ways for us to think, act, and feel tomorrow—where human and planetary organic life forms can productively and creatively cocreate in stunning and remarkable new ways a future for Latinxs—for all.

Table of Contents

Preface            Dreaming Latinx Realities

Introduction    ¡Seguimos en la Lucha!

Part I   Dreaming of New Homes

How Juan Bobo Got to los Nueba Yores

Those Rumors of Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

Saint Simon of 9th and Oblivion

Ancestral Lines and Other Tall Tales

Quetzal Feathers

Tía Abuela's Face, Ten Ways

Part II  Dreams Interrupted

Jean

Like Flowers Through Concrete

A Flock for the Sandhill Crane

Fancy

Time Traveler Intro

The Music Box

Part III My Life in Dreams

My First Word

Do as I Do

The Clarification Oral History Project

Curanderas in the Ceiling

Dream Rider

Spooky Action at a Distance

BlindVision

Part IV When Dreams Awaken

The Chupacabra Next Door

An Adventure of Xuxa, La Ultima

Night Flowers

Alma y Corazón

Ella

Two-Bullet Cowgirl Blues

A Mirage

The One

Grave Talk

Part V  Dreams Never Imagined

A Dangerous Wand

Madrina

Bad Sun

Beacon

Her Number

Old Folks

Soledad

Contraband

The ENCRoach Program

Homebound

Contributors

Editorial Reviews

★ 06/07/2021

Hernandez, García, and Goodwin follow Latinx Rising with an outstanding showcase of contemporary Latinx authors exploring identity through the conventions of sci-fi, fantasy, and magical realism. Themes of family, migration, and community resonate throughout these 38 masterful stories, as in “Jean” by Nina Pitsirlios, which uses wormholes as a metaphor to consider intergenerational trauma. Ernest Hogan explores decolonization in “Those Rumors of Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice Have Been Greatly Exaggerated,” in which two truck drivers in the liberated region of Aztlán—formerly the southwestern United States—pick up a hitchhiking American anthropologist. Patrick Lugo’s “Contraband,” which takes the form of a comic, sees a young woman working to smuggle illicit goods across the future U.S.–Mexico border. The editors do an impressive job bringing together stories that represent both a wide variety of subgenres and the vast diversity of Latinx experience. This is a knockout. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"An outstanding showcase of contemporary Latinx authors exploring identity through the conventions of sci-fi, fantasy, and magical realism. Themes of family, migration, and community resonate throughout these 38 masterful stories. ... This is a knockout." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Spanning genres from science fiction to fantasy to magical realism and also including comics, poetry, and plays, these stories are breathtaking in their expansiveness."--Margaret Kingsbury, Buzzfeed

"Speculative Fiction for Dreamers is an exciting and mind-expanding collection of short stories by contemporary Latinx authors. ... The stories take place in alternate Latinx-centric worlds and futures. They are fun, irreverent, and subversive, saturated by self-confidence and spirit." --Erika Harlitz Kern, Foreword Reviews

"Speculative Fiction for Dreamers brilliantly runs the gamut of visual, oral, and textual storytelling, creating magical wormholes that link Indigenous past to place-rooted present, imagined futures, and the abode of syncretic gods. These vital pieces resonate like entangled particles of ancestors and descendants, boundless possibilities stemming from Latinx identity. An important anthology that will inspire readers to dream and discover." --David Bowles, author of Rise of the Halfling King

"In imaginatively reconfiguring the past, present, and future--and our dreaming and waking lives--the contributors to this expansive anthology capture the kaleidoscopic experiences of Latinx folks living in the Américas. These evocative stories embrace a multitude of forms to surprise us with what is possible. This is a book I've been dreaming about and waiting for." --Rachelle Cruz, author of God's Will for Monsters

From the Publisher