INTRODUCTION
Patrice Caldwell
When I was fourteen, a family friend gifted me a copy of Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed. I still remember that moment. The Black woman on the front cover. The used-paperback smell. The way I held it close like it carried within it the secrets of many universes.
I devoured it and all of her others. I found myself in her words. And I’m not the only one.
It seems only fitting that the title of this anthology comes from Butler’s Parable of the Talents, a novel that is ever relevant.
The full quote is “In order to rise from its own ashes, a phoenix first must burn.”
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Storytelling is the backbone of my community. It is in my blood.
My parents raised me on stories of real-life legends like Queen Nzinga of Angola, Harriet Tubman, Phillis Wheatley, and Angela Davis. Growing up in the American South, my world was full of stories, of traditions and superstitions—like eating black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day for luck or “jumping the broom” on your wedding day. Raised on a diet of Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and Star Wars, I preferred creating and exploring fictional universes to living in my real one.
But whenever I went to the children’s section of the library to discover more tales, the novels featuring characters who looked like me were, more often than not, rooted in pain set amid slavery, sharecropping, or segregation. Those narratives are important, yes. But because they were the only ones offered, I started to wonder, Where is my fantasy, my future? Why don’t Black people exist in speculative worlds?
Too often media focuses on our suffering. Too often we are portrayed as victims. But in reality, we advocate for and save ourselves long before anyone else does, from heroes my parents taught me of to recent ones like Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, the Black women who founded Black Lives Matter.
Malcolm X said, “The most neglected person in America is the Black Woman.” I believe this is even more true for my fellow queer siblings, and especially for those identifying as trans and as gender nonconforming. We are constantly under attack.
And yet still we rise from our own ashes.
We never accept no.
With each rebirth comes a new strength.
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Black women are phoenixes.
We are given lemons and make lemonade.
So are the characters featured in this collection of stories.
These sixteen stories highlight Black culture, folktales, strength, beauty, bravery, resistance, magic, and hope. They will take you from a ship carrying teens who are Earth’s final hope for salvation to the rugged wilderness of New Mexico’s frontier. They will introduce you to a revenge-seeking hairstylist, a sorcerer’s apprentice, and a girl whose heart is turning to ash. And they will transport you to a future where all outcomes can be predicted by the newest tech, even matters of the heart.
Though some of these stories contain sorrow, they ultimately are full of hope. Sometimes you have to shed who you were to become who you are.
As my parents used to remind me, Black people have our pain, but our futures are limitless.
Let us, together, embrace our power.
Let us create our own worlds.
Let us thrive.
And so our story begins . . .
WHEN LIFE HANDS YOU A LEMON FRUITBOMB
By Amerie
When I was ten, the orcs dropped out of a clear summer-blue sky and landed in the middle of Central Park. They were in something that looked like one of our ships, only a lot bigger with a lot less attention to aesthetic. I was at home in Brooklyn, sitting at the kitchen table playing cards with my uncle Junior and Cynthia IV. She wasn’t playing because that capability was broken, and I was just reintroducing myself for the third time in twenty minutes, thanks to her facial recognition being shot. Yet another concession my uncle had to deal with, her being noncertified preowned AI and whatnot.
Anyway, on the wall we watched as more of these ships came down all over the world, looking like the latest publicity stunt for some rapper’s album, only they were shooting people with laser guns and their victims didn’t look like extras. They were cabbies and women with shopping bags and kids with hover soles and shawarma-eating pedestrians and police officers and foreign tourists with old-school point-and-shoot camera phones and not one of them was getting up.
Afterward, Uncle June covered the windows with foil, baked me his famous miniature sweet potato pies, and spent the rest of the day holding me under one arm, as if I were a package he’d sworn to keep safe, which, really, I sort of was.
After half a week, Uncle June ventured outside every day, patrolling the neighborhood in his Cadillac, riding farther and farther out, searching for anyone who might need help. You can’t keep doing that, I’d say, but we both knew what I was really saying: Keep this up, and one day you won’t come back. But he’d shake his head. Lil Bit, you know I can’t stay up in here while people out there need food, water, a ride, a shoulder. One time I blocked the door. You can’t save the world, Uncle June! And he paused long enough for me to think that maybe I’d gotten through. But then he shrugged. You do what you can, Lil Bit. He grabbed his homemade first aid kit and the plastic containers he’d filled with tap water and nudged me out of the way and didn’t come back all day.
Not long after that, we got a call from Uncle June’s aunt’s best friend, Judith. She and her prayer circle were having a hard time. They were a handful of old ladies who didn’t have any family (read: protection), and Judith begged Uncle June to come down to Baltimore and help. The orcs hadn’t brought their killing spree down there yet, but there’d been several break-ins. It took him a while, but seeing as there weren’t as many living people to help around the neighborhood, he agreed. I think leaving New York had a lot to do with me, with the promise he made my dad. Dad never would’ve expected me to be in the latest sneakers or have the latest neuralnet upgrade, but Uncle June and I both knew that at the very least, Dad would’ve expected his brother to keep me alive.
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What I do way out here in the boonies of space means the difference between life and death for my uncle. I’ll get something, Uncle June, I promise.
I’ve just thirty minutes ago finished patrolling the perimeter of Savior One. I sped around in a gleaming pod, blending in as much as a white washing machine amongst a heap of ashes as I swiveled my head to peer through the domed glass of the two-seater, eyes going 360 while my hands itched for my rifle. We’ve been here twenty-six days (more like one and a half Earth months), and forget finding a metropolis or orc city—we haven’t found a single campsite. But we know they’re burrowed somewhere in this watery ghost planet.