Love in Futures Past

LOVE IN FUTURES PAST

by Nara Monteiro

In 1870, trailblazing feminist and gender non-conforming writer George Sand wrote to a dear friend:

“What an age! Every one is dying, everything is dying, and the earth is dying also, eaten up by the sun and the wind. I don’t know where I get the courage to keep on living in the midst of these ruins. Let us love each other to the end.”

In 2026, I sometimes don’t know where I get the courage to keep on living in the midst of these ruins. In a world of rising fascism, of wars cultural and literal, of genocides, of natural and unnatural disasters, courage is a constant effort.

And yet it comes. It must. I am on the lookout, constantly, for the places from which I can draw courage, and it often comes from the past. I am a person who loves evidence. I love the certainty—or the feeling of it, at least—in a thing whose solidity is earned through retrospective analysis and the long tail of observed impact. Our predecessors have achieved and learned and survived so much.

The stories and poems in this issue reach into the past: for stories passed down from ancestors, ancient divination practices, and landscapes that have shaped humanity for eons. They ground themselves in the past to reach into futures near and far: to synthetic gestation and robotic wildlife and faraway planets. 

We, too, will one day be someone’s past. We face new and immense challenges, but many of the struggles of our everyday lives are ancient: grief, illness, interpersonal conflict, oppression. Our predecessors lived through those struggles—sometimes long lives, sometimes short, often defiant. 

And they had a lot to say about it. It is a gift that George Sand, an ancestor in both the literary and queer lineages that have shaped who I am, could reach out from 136 years ago to help me find courage today. The writers in this issue have given me courage too. Perhaps one of them will give courage to a reader in the year 2162, 136 years from today. 

It is hard to imagine, but isn’t imagining what we do best in science fiction and fantasy? These stories and poems reach backward and forward, but they also reach inward to the imagination, to joyous transformations of the body and expansive mysteries of the natural world. Imagination—that singularly human trait—is a crucible in which hope can be forged.

This is an issue about finding sure footing in what has come before and looking ahead with clear eyes. It is an issue about finding the courage to keep on living amidst these ruins. It is a long path, but it starts and ends with love.

Nara Monteiro