A People's Future of the United States: Speculative Fiction from 25 Extraordinary Writers

You know what this country is?” she said. “This country is a man trying to describe a burning building without using the word fire. -Omar El Akkad in "Riverbed

There are stories about perfection, but those stories are lies. No one ever made the world better by being perfect. There is only mess in humans, and sometimes that mess turns to magic, and sometimes that magic turns to kindness, to salvation, to survival.

The man on TV said Americans are good people you know but they only vote one of two ways with their hearts or with their heads and let’s hope it’s not too late let’s hope it’s not too late but thank the Lord this time they came to their senses and voted with their heads. But it didn’t seem to me like they voted with their heads. It seemed like they voted with their fangs.

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Bless all families in spirit and reality. For all deserve to be fed, cared for, raised to thrive. Provided with housing and education, embraced as full and free people.

Whatever fuckery was about to unfold, she would meet it with swagger.

I had never known Bonnie to talk like this. So depressed and ... gnomic? But then I remembered it was her birthday, so perhaps she was mourning the way all women of our age were supposed to mourn the precipitous vanishing of our worth, like, Whoops, time to grow a personality, which the world will also devalue!

Father sat in his easy chair, occasionally shaking his head and saying how this was just the way the cycle worked—one time they vote for what they believe themselves to be and the next they get angry and vote for what they really are.

Father said he wasn’t worried. He said Americans are like this, brittle with privilege. Sometimes anger robs them of their senses and they make bad decisions, but in a way this was really just another testament to American greatness—how adept the United States was at surviving its endless self-inflicted wounds. We live in a good country, he said, and it will be good again.

I turned to my wife and said, "Damn, this country hates women." She said, "You're only now just figuring that out?

We cackled, some of us actively trying to screech like evil witches because it was funnier, and the longer we cackled the more we just felt it was the exact right way to laugh—not laughing because everything was so joyous and unblemished but simply because you were all bitches in hell together, so why not laugh, why not understand that everything contains at least one tiny nugget of its opposite, why not find a socially acceptable way to shriek with rage in public?

When do things change entirely you wonder? When do they get better? When will it be possible? It is possible now. You are built to open your fists and show me your palms and to pass food from them into the hands of others. You are built for comfort and for fire, for battle and for poetry and you are a child of my family and my family was made by the world. Here we stand in the dark now and I am old and you are holding my hand and walking me from the bed to the window. We are looking out at all of it, the wonder and the danger. There are voices and the sun blazes and everything is bright enough that if I were reading the letters on your skin, I wouldn’t be able to parse them. Now look at your own hand and the wrinkles in them. Those wrinkles are what happens when you clinch your fists. You were born for this resistance, for this preparation, for this life. You were born to fight.

DANIEL H. WILSON is a Cherokee citizen and the author of the New York Times bestselling Robopocalypse and its sequel Robogenesis, as well as seven other books, including How to Survive a Robot Uprising, A Boy and His Bot, and Amped.

Meaning is created by the dialectic of form and function, and meaning is the hammer with which we carve our lives from χάος and ἄπειρον, the formless infinite.

And, yeah, she had known when she signed the mortgage papers that she was agreeing to a certain degree of surveillance in exchange for finally living what she’d been raise to consider the American Dream. She had simply never considered that one day she might prefer waking up.

We’ve been living under siege so long that fear stopped making

even the revolutionary can fail when they curl into comfort. (Read after Burning by Maria Dahvana Headley)

It was a tin-can-telephone apocalypse. (Read after Burning by Maria Dahvana Headley)

My mother died in childbirth, because by that time there were no doctors left in our city. The last one had been executed. (Read after Burning by Maria Dahvana Headley)

If you asked any of the Librarians from my town, they’d tell you their sleep went dreamless long before the country officially declared itself an oh fuck. (Read after Burning by Maria Dahvana Headley)

All this happened a long time ago, before the story you know. You were born in a world that wasn’t ending. (Read after Burning by Maria Dahvana Headley)

We are allowed to leave. We are not prisoners. We just have to sign out first. (The Synapse will Free Us from Ourselves by Violet Allen)

Meanwhile, nobody said, Haha, dang, isn’t it bad enough that rape and assault and abuse and harassment and boyfriends doing the emotional psychosexual whatever equivalent of sticking their beefy hand into your brain and wearing it like a baseball mitt or a puppet so they can just really move it around and infinity et cetera happens to so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so many of us, and we can’t even talk about it without having to apologize afterward?

It’s quiet for a second and so I start to think. About how people take from each other. They take and take. Our world itself is a great big taking. And life is just giving. We give away everything we have, one day at a time, until we can’t give no more. I guess that’s the price of living.

Take care of your brother, Lydia, and take care of yourself; be at all times guarded. And never forget that this country despises above all else this thing they call people of color, sees them not as people at all but as harbingers of a future it can’t control. I remember liking that moniker: of color. What a thing to be in a country so black and white.

Everybody needs books, Molly figured. No matter where they live, how they love, what they believe, whom they want to kill. We all want books. The moment you start thinking of books as some exclusive club, or the loving of books as a high distinction, then you're a bad bookseller. Books are the best way to discover what people thought before you were born. And an author is just someone who tried their utmost to make sense of their own mess, and maybe their failure contains a few seeds to help you with yours.

...this was just the way the cycle worked -- one time they vote for what they believe themselves to be and the next they get angry and vote for what they really are. -Omar El Akkad in "Riverbed

I’m failing,” announced Fletcher. He was startled by the volume of his voice. He looked at the blinking blue arrow on his own computer screen and laughed. “I’m failing this class and everything else. But I’m glad I got to hang out with you guys. I’m glad I came anyway. Fuck verb agreement. I’m glad I showed up.