mission
Recombinant: An Anthology of Speculative Arts is concerned with your dreams, your nightmares, your wayward obsessions. We are seeking out speculative writing across genres of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, music, and visual art that engages with the expansive capacity to think and create in a fashion that questions our current reality and the cheap, surface-level understandings presented to us. If your work has a vexed relationship with realism, we want to see it.
We are especially interested in the work of marginalized cultural workers. Within a culture hell-bent on exclusion as the measure of who is seen as valuable and worthy, we especially want our publication to platform, center, and uplift creatives and communities that are under threat. We want to publish creators who are pushing back against the narrow and suffocating “truths” fed to us by those in power. We want works that question, challenge, and disrupt. We want works that start conversations and build alternative realities that are strange, capacious, luscious, and expansively brilliant.
In these times of intensified crisis, routinized ignorance, and systemic dismantling of the facts, realism and reality itself seem dubious. Now is a time to dream, to imagine, to innovate, and to deconstruct. As writers and publishers, we believe that visioning, creativity, pondering, and intentional wonder are more necessary than ever. It is crucial for us to visualize beyond the current constraints and violences of this iteration of reality. It is imperative that we know that other worlds are possible.