When we decided to leave Reckoning 9 without a theme, I wasn’t certain what to expect. Speculative fiction brings to environmental justice writing endless possibilities. Within speculative fiction, we explore difficult topics like climate change, pollution, and human displacement from the comfortable frames of comic sci-fi, cozy fantasy, and solarpunk. “No theme” could have well meant chaos, but even as the submissions for this issue spanned genres and galaxies and uncertain futures, I found an oft repeating thread: we are all grieving.
Some of us are grieving for the lives of loved ones lost. Some of us are grieving the loss of our homes and livelihoods to climate change. Some of us are grieving the countless ecosystems lost or nearly lost to environmental destruction and degradation. Many of us are grieving the loss of community, of connection, with each other and with our planet. For some, this grief is new. For far too many, it is generational, an historic truth with consequences immediate and future-reaching, as the essays of Marianna Ariel ColesCurtis and Jacqueline St. Pierre so rightly remind us.
It is an immense privilege to grieve with you, to not only hold space for such profound losses, but to lift the voices and hearts of those whose grief has gone too long ignored or silenced. In the way of comfort, there is little that I can say that others, many collected here, have not said better. I can only offer, through their works, the power of resistance, the strength of community, and the persistence of nature, of which we humans are still very much a part.
I hope you’ll take what you need and share what you can.
21 December 2024
From the traditional border of Tuscarora and Siouan territory.
Beautifully said.