01/07/2024
For issue 14, Angel City Review is going solarpunk. For this next issue we wanted to do something a little different and explore an area of writing that we don’t normally publish. Genre writing has an ability to explore serious themes in ways that literary fiction or nonfiction sometimes cannot. Octavia Butler was able to challenge issues of race, gender, stereotypes, and white privilege both inside and outside the written word while also making the work she produced both specific and universal. She was able to imagine future worlds where people could look like her, and also succeed. They weren’t held down by the narrow minds of bigotry. They could flourish in the Black imagination. Silvia Moreno-Garcia has been able to subvert the tropes of genre where the people who were generally considered the “other” in books, could take the center stage as they battle to not just survive, but thrive against the literal and figurative monsters of neo and post-colonialism in a gothic landscape that was in some ways familiar, but wholly new. Her work criticizes the cost and aftermath of settler colonialism, especially when the territories are no longer of value or are too resistant to be kept under tyrannical rule. Her writing examines and reckons with these very ghosts in ways that are thought provoking, yet also approachable to a large audience for many reasons. Science fiction, fantasy, and all their sub genres of speculative work have the ability to imagine a past, present, or future that works for not just the White Western European norm. This challenging and necessary work ultimately has opened the doors for writers of color to not always write about struggle or produce trauma p**n for white readers. Their American fiction can be one where the whole of their lives can be shared. Not just the parts that fit neatly into stereotypes.
So, for our next issue we are dedicating the pages completely to the genre of solarpunk.
Check out the full call at www.angelcityreview.com/submissions
