Fantastical Transcendence and the Magic of Resistance

Ruth Joffre digs into a new anthology of speculative writing about resistance, edited by Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older.

By Ruth JoffreDecember 28, 2025

• SF

THERE’S A MOMENT in the middle of an organized action—after the weeks of planning, the frenzy of sign-making and consensus-building and nail-biting about whether anybody will even show up—when the pieces start to come together and the fruits of your labor blossom. It feels like magic to look out on the crowd and see people united in support of a shared cause. In that moment, I often think, “Look at us. Look what we’ve accomplished together as a community.” I try to hold on to that feeling for as long as I can, because I know that it will end and all our achievements will start to feel small again. In the vast scheme of things, will raising a few thousand dollars for local nonprofits make a difference? Will organizing fundraisers, going to protests, and phone-banking for progressive candidates really do anything? It’s hard to remember that the answer is yes, even when it feels like no. It does matter. If it didn’t, authoritarians wouldn’t punish you for it or try to silence you. One of the first moves of every fascist or authoritarian regime is to limit free speech: what you’re allowed to say, what the press is permitted to report, what kinds of art you can create or experience. That’s why it’s so important that a book like We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope exists.

The new anthology was edited by three luminaries of speculative fiction: Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older. In the introduction, Newitz discusses how the “seemingly contradictory desire for data-driven rigor and fantastical transcendence” inspired this anthology, which both draws on our reality and imagines beyond it. The editors also note the anthology’s spiritual indebtedness to Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (2015), a book edited by adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha. Octavia’s Brood brought together activists and writers and asked them to envision the world they wanted to see. The majority of the introduction to We Will Rise Again consists of an interview with the Octavia’s Brood editors, who note that their book emerged from a “moment in movement where it really felt like … we need to unlock our imagination. […] There’s something we need to create because we’ve never seen it.” Ten years after the publication of Octavia’s Brood, it feels like we’re in a similar moment: one where we need to imagine better worlds if we’re to survive the horrors of our present day. Time may be an arrow, but it’s also a flat circle, repeating the same patterns over and over again even as it connects us to those that came before us.

We Will Rise Again carries on the spirit of Octavia’s Brood while adding to the format. In addition to speculative short fiction, the new anthology includes essays and interviews with activists, offering a practical perspective on resistance and the history of organizing for social justice. Perhaps the most interesting difference between the volumes is in the process itself: the editors of We Will Rise Again connected the writers with activists, and these seasoned experts provided useful insight and feedback during the brainstorming and drafting process. Some of the authors thank the subject matter experts in the brief notes that accompany the stories, but the nature of these conversations and how they shaped the process is often unclear. (My biggest critique of the book is, in fact, that these experts go without credit in most cases and that their contributions are thus murky—though I suppose it’s also possible that some of them did not want to be identified, given the current political climate. Still, for a book about the connection between literature and resistance, this aspect goes curiously underexplored.) What we do hear from and about activists themselves proves both refreshing and illuminating.

One of the most edifying moments of the anthology comes in the interview with L. A. Kauffman and Andrea Dehlendorf, two lifelong organizers with decades of experience in various social justice movements. Amid their discussion of some brilliant and effective actions (e.g., releasing 10,000 crickets at the NYPD headquarters to halt a land auction initiated by Rudy Giuliani), they pause to reflect on the ups and downs of movement work and how it gets represented. “What I miss sometimes when I read fiction about protest are the discouraging parts,” Kauffman says. “There’s always a long time when you’re sure you’re losing before you win, and it’s pretty hard to do a campaign without having some humiliating action that only three people show up to.” That’s just the nature of organizing. Some things work; some things don’t. You have to keep going, regardless. That can seem dispiriting, especially now when rights are backsliding, but it’s part of the process, and accepting that is key to avoiding burnout—and to writing authentic fiction about resistance. As Dehlendorf writes, “We need those stories that are messy, and two steps forward, one step back, because that is how social change happens.”

My favorite story in the anthology, “The Rise and Fall of Storm Bluff, Kansas: An Oral History” by Izzy Wasserstein, illustrates the cycle of success and failure. It is told via excerpts of interviews with people involved in the intentional community in the title town. The commune was founded by a trans woman, Lily, an anarchist who jokes about buying a house and ends up buying almost a whole town. The commune is beautiful while it lasts. People grow their own food. They help their neighbors, win skeptics over. And then conservative pundits and militias catch wind of it, and you can guess what happens next. Wasserstein weaves the story together through snippets of 11 different interviews, allowing the distinct voices to emerge and contradict each other in pursuit of a polyphonic, anarchic style that resists pinning the narrative down and ascribing it one tidy label. As Lily says, “this isn’t a story about heroes. It’s definitely not a story about me. […] I’d rather we stop looking for heroes. Heroes don’t solve problems. Communities do.” I think about this fact a lot: how no one is coming to save us, how we must save ourselves by working together despite all our flaws, all our baggage.

One of the great strengths of the anthology is how the stories portray activists—not as the caricature of the virtue-signaling woke mob that conservatives like to scream about but as regular, everyday people trying to do a little good under decidedly less than ideal circumstances. In these stories, activists are just like us. They get tired. They make mistakes. They aren’t perfect, and they don’t have to be. This is established in the anthology’s first story, R. B. Lemberg’s “Other Wars Elsewhere,” in which the main character returns from a critical aid mission only to find that her compatriots have moved on to another cause. In Tobias S. Buckell and Karen Lord’s “The Mighty Slinger,” the main characters are musicians who are unsure of how their lyrics will ultimately contribute to the revolution but are willing to play their part (and have many arguments on the way). In Charlie Jane Anders’s “Realer than Real,” the primary characters are outcasts and gender-nonconforming folks hiding from a surveillance state that harshly polices self-expression—that is, until they figure out a way to fight back with an absurdist take on originalism.

As with any anthology or story collection, readers will not necessarily love every story in We Will Rise Again because there are just so many different styles on display, and they might not be to every reader’s individual tastes. For me, this broad range is a strength of the anthology and allows it to incorporate many different voices and storytelling traditions. For example, Sam J. Miller’s “What Does Joy Look Like: A Documentary Short” uses a structure similar to Wasserstein’s story to chart the rise of an app that leads to a major shift in society. Jaymee Goh’s “A Brief Letter on the Origins of the Harpy Aviary in the Kirani Citadel” uses the epistolary form to reimagine family (and thus societal) structures. And Laia Asieo Odo’s “Where Memory Meets the Sea” follows a character whose connection with the ocean enables her to tap into memories that the government erases to maintain its power over the people. Like many other stories in the anthology, Odo’s is especially affecting because of how real it feels. In an era when the Right is attempting to rewrite history and control how we can speak about current events, a government that manipulates the way you perceive reality feels less like fiction than like fact.

To be a speculative fiction writer today is to see all the radical ideas and groundbreaking technologies you’ve been thinking about for decades get twisted into gnarled, soulless facsimiles by big businesses and so-called thought leaders. Capitalism has taken the dream of a civilization on Mars and proposed building it with indentured laborers transported in rockets that are prone to sudden implosions. Technologists claim to have developed cutting-edge artificial intelligences, but they are really automated slop machines built on the stolen labor of writers and artists who were already struggling to make ends meet in an economy that consistently devalues their art. Meanwhile, multibillion-dollar corporations promise a fantasy of endless convenience for the low cost of being surveilled by your dishwasher. We have never needed real visionaries more than we do now. The stories in We Will Rise Again offer readers a glimpse of not just how things are now but also how they could be. They present worlds where we solve problems collectively and turn new technologies into social goods rather than net negatives. These worlds might not be perfect, but they offer something even more magical than that: hope.