Speculative Fiction for Dreamers

Hernandez, García, and Goodwin follow Latinx Rising with an outstanding showcase of contemporary Latinx authors exploring identity through the conventions of sci-fi, fantasy, and magical realism. Themes of family, migration, and community resonate throughout these 38 masterful stories, as in “Jean” by Stephanie Nina Pitsirilos, which uses wormholes as a metaphor to consider intergenerational trauma. Ernest Hogan explores decolonization in “Those Rumors of Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice Have Been Greatly Exaggerated,” in which two truck drivers in the liberated region of Aztlán—formerly the southwestern United States—pick up a hitchhiking American anthropologist. Patrick Lugo’s “Contraband,” which takes the form of a comic, sees a young woman working to smuggle illicit goods across the future U.S.–Mexico border. The editors do an impressive job bringing together stories that represent both a wide variety of subgenres and the vast diversity of Latinx experience. This is a knockout. (Sept.)