Introducing the Anarchist Imagination
Everyone knows the world is a mess. There’s starvation and ecocide, racism and sexism. The rich get richer and the poor get dead, all while species go extinct and carbon warms up the air. It’s not surprising that so much of our fiction is as bleak as our future threatens to be.
But we can imagine other worlds. We can imagine better ways to organize ourselves, better ways to treat one another, better ways to treat the earth. And specifically, we can imagine worlds without the authoritarianism of the state and capitalism.
The question, then, is: what would those worlds look like?
Combustion Books, a worker-run publisher of genre fiction, is looking to publish a new line of books: The Anarchist Imagination. We are looking for novella-length (15,000-40,000 words) anarchist utopias.
Our intention is not, of course, to put down blueprints that must be followed line by line. We offer no prescription for future society. Instead, the utopia is a form we can use to explore our revolutionary desires, to showcase ideas we might put into practice, to give us glimpses of what we fight for.
The utopia is a peculiar form of fiction to write, to be sure, and we’re looking for stories that balance the exposition of society with compelling narrative and character. The stories can be set in our own world–past, present, or future–or in fantasy. The politics can be anything anti-state, the economics anything that isn’t capitalism. As this series goes on, we hope to showcase just how wide this terrain can be.
Submissions can be sent to submissions@combustionbooks.org.
You can also view our regular submission guidelines.
