On Fractures, Wholeness, and Becoming

ON FRACTURES, WHOLENESS, AND BECOMING

by Frankie Hagg

As Augur Magazine undergoes metamorphosis this year, it’s fitting that our issues so ardently tackle themes of shapeshifting. When Kerry and Toria asked me if I’d spearhead an issue, it was a huge opportunity in countless respects. “Becoming” is a huge motif in my own work and life, and to be part of what the Augur Society is now becoming is a great privilege—and so on-theme.

Issue 7.2, which you now behold, takes up the torch of “becoming” through the lens of fractures: how they happen, how they are mended, and what these processes make of us. 

Our protagonists, narrators, lovers, and sisters are heartbroken, war-torn, looking for home, and looking for answers. They want peace, sex, storytelling, and closure. They want to overcome an overpowering bureaucracy; they want to renew old connections, and to forge new ones. They want to travel, to dive, to seek. They want teeth, scales, water, and skin.

Great speculative fiction operates in contradictions of scale. It paints expanses to draw out the minute. What I love most about science fiction is that, in orienting us outward, it urges us to look inward. This is a science fiction–heavy issue, with all the emotions that entails: wonder, dread, and an inescapable throughline of hope.

This issue of Augur invites us to look to the sky to give new meaning to what’s beneath our feet. It invites us to find—or transcend—the humanity within the system. It tells stories of how our fractures make, break, and mend us—or how we route around them when the chasm is deep. 

It is our great honour to share these eleven glimpses into our changeable human galaxy with you.

Frankie Hagg
Senior Editor