From genre luminaries, esteemed organizers, and exciting new voices in fiction, an anthology of stories, essays, and interviews that offer transformative visions of the future, fantastical alternate worlds, and inspiration for the social justice movements of tomorrow.

In this collection, editors Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older champion realistic, progressive social change using the speculative stories of writers across the world. Exploring topics ranging from disability justice and environmental activism to community care and collective worldbuilding, these imaginative pieces from writers such as NK Jemisin, Charlie Jane Anders, Alejandro Heredia, Sam J. Miller, Nisi Shawl, and Sabrina Vourvoulias center solidarity, empathy, hope, joy, and creativity.

Each story is grounded within a broader sociopolitical framework using essays and interviews from movement leaders, including adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha, charting the future history of protest, revolutions, and resistance with the same zeal for accuracy that speculative writers normally bring to science and technology. Using the vehicle of ambitious storytelling, We Will Rise Again offers effective tools for organizing, an unflinching interrogation of the status quo, and a blueprint for prefiguring a different world.

My Review:

This fascinating collection, edited by Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz and Malka Older, does something that isn’t done often – or perhaps just not often enough. Because it deals with real world issues explicitly through speculative fiction, it deliberately puts the included stories in dialogue with essays by and interviews with thinkers and especially doers who have experience with the problems raised and carried into the speculative realm.

This collection is also an homage and a continuation of the book Octavia’s Brood, edited by adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha in 2015. It is both right and fitting that interviews with brown and Imarisha are part of the introduction to this current work.

My personal reading of this book focused on the included short stories which were written specifically for this collection, rather than the essays and interviews, many of which have been previously published elsewhere.

R.B. Lemberg – “Other Wars Elsewhere” c2025

This fantasy is a bit about the magic of places to pull at the heart, but is mostly about wars and refugee crises and people’s attention span for caring and giving to people and places that are not their own. It’s also a story about activism, both in the sense of doing it and in the sense of being caught up in the performance of it. And it’s also the story of a young woman learning that just because there’s a new crisis it doesn’t mean that an individual isn’t still emotionally attached to the old one and that sometimes you find your place to help and sometimes you come back to it. Mivka is a stand-in for Ukraine but that is far from all it is. Escape Rating A-

Rose Eveleth – “Originals Only” c2025
On the one hand this SF story has some fascinating things to say about athletes and how they’re viewed and lionized and cut down to size, how their lives are so wrapped up in their sport and prepping for it that they get tunnel vision, how little control they have over their lives and how they’re not prepared for their day in the sun to end – while also talking about how politics weaponizes people and talking points and whatever is top of mind to score off against marginalized groups and play identity politics. The problem with the story is that the protagonist is pretty much a cipher even at the ending. There’s no there there to wrap the story around – which may also be part of the point but leaves a void at the story’s center. Escape Rating B

Laia Asieo Odo – “Where Memory Meets the Sea” c2025

The story is about the erasure of memory and history, but makes it personal, poignant and downright heartbreaking by setting it in a world and specifically a country where individual memory erasure is possible and government sanctioned. The people have one day per year where they can remember and experience their losses, but even that is too much for a repressive government, leaving everyone with holes in their memories, injuries upon their bodies, and missing friends and family they’re not allowed to remember. Because if they did they’d overthrow them all. We know that history is written by the victors, and that counter-narratives to accepted truth get suppressed on the regular, but this puts the whole terrible thing and breaks the reader’s heart with grief and loss – even the ones that we don’t remember. Escape Rating A+

Samit Basu – “Disruption” c2025

This was interesting in that it’s not the first story I’ve read recently about weaponizing history erasure and using accepted truths to push a narrative. This one is a bit different because it also pulls in not just the evils of AI in general and the evils of AI in particular to do this work, but also the evils of letting AI control human behavior. It reminds me a bit of Where the Axe is Buried but is trying a bit too hard to be arch and the keystone doesn’t quite fit. Escape Rating B

Nisi Shawl – “The Gray and the Green” c2025

This one was weird – but that’s appropriate because the protagonist was totally weirded out. The story centers on a rather rapacious business owner who does an excellent job exploiting legal loopholes to make more money with fewer consequences. They start getting messages from their future self, attempting to set themselves on a better, more community-oriented but still highly profitable, path. It was a neat idea but didn’t quite work for me. Escape Rating B-

Sabrina Vourvoulias – “Perséfoni in the City” c2025

This story is about government corruption, community activism and the importance of food security, wrapped up in beautiful poetry and set in a world where food is a kind of magic in ways beyond the obvious. This was a story with a lot of irons in its fire, all of which were stories of their own. It would have worked better for me if it had picked a few of its storylines to follow through on – or if it had been long enough for all those crops to have had time to grow. And for a story intended for a speculative fiction collection, the speculative element was very slight. Escape Rating B

Jaymee Goh – “A Brief Letter on the Origins of the Harpy Aviary in the Kirani Citadel” c2025

This was fun, somewhat satirical and very pointed. Also feathered and clawed. It’s a story about sanctioned rebellions in a fantasy kingdom with a fascinating political structure where seemingly all marriages are polygamous in all directions, where children can inherit from anyone in the parental group – even the throne, and where outsiders coming in think that their quaint, backwards, “western” ways will hold sway over the Kirani’s very sensible arrangements for things. One pretender to the throne tries to bribe his way to the top, only to be overthrown by a mage who summons harpies to rout his illegal government. She’s in the right, but no good deed goes unpunished so she becomes the official heir AND is endlessly harangued by everyone who has to deal with the damage done by the harpies. The entire story is told in a letter to a friend, begging for at least a visit to help her get away from her onerous, necessary, but unwanted elevation to the crown. Escape Rating A-

Malka Older – “Aversion” c2025

At first, it seems like this story is about technology, kind of a reverse of subliminal advertising, where tech is used to show things people don’t want to see and generally turn their eyes away from. Things like horrific accidents, incidents of terrorism, war and peacetime atrocities. Then it pulls back a bit, and turns into a story about whether the ends of getting people to see the things that make them uncomfortable is worth the means of forcing them to do so. When that devolves into a debate about safety and security and protecting the children, it all sounds familiar but also necessary AND, more importantly, how easy it is to derail anything uncomfortable – if it pokes at the status quo. Then it pulls back again and it becomes a question about why people don’t see the truth of the world and how to get them to turn their attention back ON. This isn’t a fun story, but it is thought-provoking, particularly in that everyone is right but everyone is also very wrong. Escape Rating B+

Charlie Jane Anders – “Realer Than Real” c2025

This was fun, but it also made its point and hit it hard and well. At its heart, its a story that exposes the contradiction among conservatives that they want the US Constitution to be interpreted as the Founding Fathers would have seen it in the late 18th century. And at the same time they want it to enshrine the status quo as it is today – meaning that they want the law to enforce current ‘norms’ whatever those might be. The story takes that contradiction and pushes the envelope in both directions by poking directly at the way that some want to lock people down in their gender presentation based on how they look and how they dress and whether or not that conforms to ‘accepted’ interpretations of male and female. Because the clothing worn in the late 18th century – by the Founding Fathers and Mothers themselves – does not conform to 21st century standards AT ALL. And it doesn’t have to and neither should anyone today or any other day. Watching the drones all go spare and the Supreme Court judges get turned around was funny, but the point still got made and reinforced among the laughs. Escape Rating A+

Izzy Wasserstein – “The Rise and Fall of Storm Bluff, Kansas: An Oral History” c2025
This was an ultimately sad story about a failed anarchist revolution. The thing is that it should have worked, but the powers that be that preserve the status quo and stay in power by separating groups couldn’t tolerate the entirely legal and extremely cooperative purchase of all the land in a dying town in the middle of Kansas by a group of anarchists led by a transwoman, so they created a crisis so they could bring in troops and shut it all down. The story is told as a series of interviews with the survivors and its both fascinating and heartbreaking. A part of me wants to say that it wouldn’t happen like this because everything was done ‘right’ and legally, but reality says that it would. Dammit. Escape Rating A

Vida James – “Chupacabras” c2025

This is a story of frustration and rage – and it’s impossible not to feel both while reading. I think it hits even hard now than it did when it was written – or perhaps its that the theme feels realer and closer because it’s no longer just somewhere else but also here – albeit in a different way. The story is set in Puerto Rico, and it’s a story about hypergentrification, about the way the island is treated as a colony instead of a real part of the U.S., the way that the laws are written to favor the mainland instead of the citizens – or even just treating the citizens equally with other U.S. citizens. It’s about activism burnout, about how hard it is to keep fighting when the enemy owns all the battlefields for public awareness – and then it personalizes the whole fight into one woman, one monster and one very bloody possibility for extreme change. I can’t say I liked this story, exactly, but I absolutely did feel it. Escape Rating B

Alejandro Heredia – “If I Could Stay with You on Earth” c2025

This story was surprisingly sweet. It’s also a story where a non-violent protest is successful. And it’s a bit of a love story AND a love-letter to the Bronx at the same time. (And it made me want to go back and read The City We Became with its commentary on the personality of the five boroughs. It’s also a story about the power of an organized group to move the needle towards justice IF they have fair access to the lines of communication. It’s also, just a bit, about the impossibility of getting teenagers to hear the word “No”, but this time in a good way. It’s also a great story to shift the reader into a bit of a more hopeful space particularly after “Chupacabras”. Escape Rating A-

Annalee Newitz – “One of the Lesser-Known Revolutions” c2025

I’ve often said that I’m grateful to have grown up before digital footprints. Whatever mistakes I made – and they were as legion as anyone else’s – are not preserved and regurgitated over the internet. This story, in a way, reflects that era in that it’s about a group of students who want to go back to some of that, the idea that free speech isn’t an absolute right and that people who want to talk about murdering people and groups they hate have the right to say what they want but they don’t have the right to say it where they want. They can hate if they want, but they need to keep it private. Which is kind of the way it used to be before the megaphone of the internet existed. It’s a story about going back to enforcing the old stricture about not shouting fire in a crowded theater. While I loved the idea that it would keep haters from spamming and doxxing people they’ve decided to hate all over the internet, I can’t unsee the slippery slope this leads to. Escape Rating B

Kelly Robson – “Blockbuster” c2025

This managed to be both fun and sad at the same time, because it posits a world – or at least a tiny corner of it – where things are working as they could. And it’s wrapped around street burlesque in Toronto, which is inherently as fun as it is subversive. And it’s immersive, and the story is about one filmmaker who gets immersed and caught up in the possibilities of entertainment as a wedge to create social change even though the money backing his production pushes him towards cutting down the effort and preserving the status quo. The story is a lot bigger than all of this, and I liked what it was doing but didn’t care much for the protagonist or the cookie-cutter villain. Escape Rating B-

Abdulla Moaswes – “Kifaah and the Gospel” c2025

From one perspective, this is a story about AI as a tool of colonialism and the erasure of the cultures that colonialism wipes out in its rapaciousness. From another perspective, it resembles Nnedi Okorafor’s African futurism, even though this is not set in Africa, but rather the idea of the people who were once subjugated, returning to their land and making it their own, again. While, from a third perspective it reads as an attempt at cultural erasure that failed, as it centers around an artifact that, as much as it tells a terrible – and terribly slanted – story about cultural erasure in its historical past, becomes an object of error and derision when its programming forces it to assert that the present that is actually around it doesn’t exist. At the same time, the historical conflict that it references, the conflict that exists in our present between the Arabs and the Israelis in the Middle East is reduced to a simple binary that doesn’t sit right with this admittedly biased reader. I’m not sure I can rate this fairly because I can’t be remotely objective about it. But I’m still thinking about it, and that might be the most important part.

Overall Rating B+: Due to the collection’s mix of fiction and nonfiction, I can’t decide whether the rating should be “Escape” or “Reality”, particularly as even the fiction – or perhaps that’s especially the fiction, is real-world thought-provoking, as intended. However, speaking of the thoughts this collection evoked, I would highly recommend Cadwell Turnbull’s Convergence Saga, recently concluded with A Ruin, Great and Free, as a readalike for We Will Rise Again as his story brings so many of the concepts in this compelling collection to fantastic life.