Six years ago, during the Covid shutdown, I found myself with a lot of time on my hands and facing the sudden collapse of what I had thought my future would look like. I was living in Pittsburgh at the time, just down the street from one of the city’s best features: the 400-acre, wooded hills of Allegheny Cemetery. It was the perfect place to go for long walks where I could, if only temporarily, escape from everything else. Unfortunately, I lived on the opposite side from the entrance gate.
To break out, I would have to break in.
Luckily, another of Pittsburgh’s distinctive features is its thriving anarchist community. Having made a few friends of the black-flag persuasion, I learned how to freely navigate the city—how to find secret staircases, abandoned boats in the river, and gaps in the chain-link cemetery fence.
Around the same time, I also started looking for escape where I had found it as a child: in science fiction and fantasy stories. A clean escape requires sharp bolt-cutters, so I sought out the cutting-edge—what are magazines publishing these days? Who’s the new Ursula K. Le Guin?
Pretty soon, I stumbled on an intriguing aubergine-colored website. It published beautiful and quirky stories, titled everything from “We Are Here to Be Held” to “Dirty Wi-Fi.” The magazine was totally free, dared to experiment, and appeared to be run like an anarchist commune (something, as I mentioned, I’d developed a certain fondness for).
Strange Horizons soon had my devoted readership. Shortly thereafter, it also had one of my early, awkward attempts at science fiction in its slush pile. I wanted to be a part of this beautiful organism, an international effort to open portals to other worlds. And at first, I thought that would be through gracing its pages with my genius.
After getting humbled, I reached out again a couple years later to volunteer as a slush reader. I got more humbled. As a slush reader, I learned that for every concept I considered myself clever for coming up with, there were a hundred people who had not only had the same idea, but turned it into a far better story. I learned I needed to read more. A lot more. Everything, actually.
So, I’m still working on that.
But I’m happy to announce that as of this year, I am getting to do so in the context of a new role at Strange Horizon:
Fiction editor (!!!?)
Six years ago, when I first fell in love with Strange Horizons, I could never have imagined I’d become one of its editors. I’ve still got total imposter syndrome. But I’m so grateful for the opportunity to become even more involved with the magazine that not only reignited my love for speculative fiction, but provided me with an invaluable escape during difficult times.
Ursula K. Le Guin once answered the criticism of “escapism” by affirming: “Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?” And, she concluded, “if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.”
I still have a lot to read and a lot to learn. I’m still getting more humbled every day. But what I do know is how to break out by breaking in. How to find where someone has made a hole in the chain-link fence. How to wave my hands over my head like a crazy person and holler “this way! over here! OVER HERE!”
I can’t guarantee we won’t be escaping into a cemetery.
In fact, the first escape hatch I’m excited to share, “This Obituary Has Been Retracted” by P.C. Verrone, opens into something not unlike a city of the dead: told through obituaries in a 1980’s gay men’s magazine, it imagines a world where the AIDS epidemic suddenly and mysteriously changes course.
It’s really fun and it made me cry a lot, which is why I picked it.
Now get in, loser, we’re escaping.
Over here!!!
AUSTIN DEWAR 