Welcome to the Zines to the Future! virtual tour of our theme in stories and art, which responds to the current transformation of sf by diverse writers and presents new art by CSUF students.
We chose our theme, “Imagining Diverse Futures,” to inspire our zinesters and artists. Zines are meant to work on the cutting edge to promote change. Science fiction dreams of the future. We wanted our artists, like our zinesters, to respond to compelling futures effecting our changing now.
Feminist sf (emerging in the 1970s) and Afrofuturism (named in the 1990s, but much older) have already transformed science fiction. Both are movements that are part of, but also beyond, genre in the cause of social justice.
Newer movements arise now, including Latinx sf or “mundos alternos,” Silkpunk (which explores a particular kind of Asian-American sf), Indigenous Futurisms, Queer Futurisms, “Cli-Fi” (or SF Climate Fiction), and more.
The urgency of our theme is visible in the upcoming Innovative Arts Futures Conference, taking place December 3rd on the CSUF campus. The Zines to the Future! Project is excited to co-sponsor the “Future Fictions” panel at 6pm, featuring Nisi Shawl, author of the wonderful Retro-Afrofuturist (or Afro-Steampunk) novel Everfair. The conference is presented by the Institute for Black Intellectual Innovation, and hosted by Cal State Fullerton’s African American Studies department. Plan to come listen!
For our artists, we chose a small collection of pioneering, award-winning sf stories to embody our theme. These stories were given to CSUF student artists to inspire new visions of diverse futures. You can read the stories yourself! Each story has a link on our theme page of the Zines to the Future! website. We will only tease them here....
Two featured stories come from authors in our programming, including:
a new work by Ernest Hogan, “Tomorrow is Another Daze” (2020), currently up at Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination page.
and an “Excerpt from Everfair” (2016) by Nisi Shawl, housed at Tot.com.
We hope you listen to these authors on our panels...and seek out their work!
We also chose five more crucial stories to exemplify our theme for our artists:
Luis Valdez’s “Los Vendidos” (left, 1967), is a one act play from the famous El Teatro Campesino playwright. This short play has sometimes been called “the one with the Chicano robots.”
Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild” (1984), is a complex and emotional story of love and sacrifice between enslaved humans and their alien captors. Painful and revelatory.
Gloria Anzuldúa's "Interface" (1987), from her essential work of criticism (but also poetry), Borderlands, is a narrative poem about bringing an alien lover home to meet the family.
Ken Liu, inventor of the Silkpunk movement and a major translator of Chinese sf, brings us the sole survivor of Japanese ancestry aboard a generation starship in peril in “Mono no Aware” (2012).
and indigenous futurist Rebecca Roanhorse, author of Trail of Lightning (2018, above), blurs boundaries between virtual environments and authentic legacies in the dazzling, award-winning “Your Authentic Native American Experience™” (2017)
Read these stories! You will be amazed. All are freely available online and the collected links have a page on our website.
Now move on to the art! What are you waiting for? Enlarge the images in the art gallery to see what stories inspired which art!