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INTRODUCTION

CITY OF ILLUSIONS

Los Angeles is named after heavenly beings, but here at the continent’s edge, it’s always been the demons that inflame our imaginations and apocalypse that haunts our dreams.

As I write this, the world grapples with a deadly pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands and upended civilization. Los Angeles is only one more data point in this tragedy, but residing in an incubator of the future, Angelenos have long lived with the tropes of dystopian fiction. In addition to plagues, reality for us also means giant forest fires that poison our air and block the sun; powerful earthquakes; extreme droughts; rising seas; Orwellian surveillance; exploding tent cities of the dispossessed; and Hollywood’s dream factory, where the blight of celebrity worship began.

Indeed, one can argue that Los Angeles is already so weird, surreal, irrational, and mythic that any fiction emerging from this place should be considered speculative.

From the moment our ancestors founded El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río Porciúncula, we began to conjure up a fictional utopian past that suited us better than the blood-and-genocide-soaked reality of our Western frontier.

This land was built on ghosts. And over the centuries, each newcomer from Duluth, New Haven, Yerevan, and Tegucigalpa added her own wraiths, devils, and shape-shifters, contributing to an urban fantasy that only ever seems fully realized in our imaginations.

Los Angeles is like the hologram girlfriend in Blade Runner 2049, flickering in and out of reality. And like a thirsty starlet, LA can be anything you want it to be, plus what your worst nightmares can’t imagine.

But don’t take my word for it—read these stories. We’ve asked fourteen of the city’s most prophetic voices to reimagine Los Angeles in any way they choose. In these pages, you’ll encounter twenty-first-century changelings; a postapocalyptic landfill where humans piloting giant robots fight for survival; black holes and jacaranda men lurking in deepest suburbia; beachfront property in Century City; walled-off canyons and coastlines reserved for the wealthy; psychic death cults and robot nursemaids; guerrillas resisting fascism from deep in the San Gabriel Mountains; an alternate LA where Spanish land grants never gave way to urbanization; and lastly, you will visit a world where global pandemics have wreaked the ultimate havoc.

LA’s speculative possibilities have long mesmerized writers. Nathanael West, Harlan Ellison, Octavia Butler, Philip K. Dick, and Aldous Huxley all lived and set stories in fragmented, tribal, destroyed, or creepily utopian Los Angeles. Moviemakers too. The visual genius of Blade Runner was transplanting Dick’s novel from Northern California to LA, where a slickly decayed techno world mixed the Pacific Rim glam of Little Tokyo, the fortress architecture of Downtown, and the eerie art deco decayed elegance of the Bradbury Building.

In Speculative Los Angeles, you too can scramble through the ruins of Hollywood and NASA JPL, the fortified police sectors downtown, the squatter hills of Echo Park, the sacred springs of Los Encinos, the resistance tunnels below the Angeles National Forest, the once golden, now flooded coastline.

More than just disaster porn, these stories explore the bonds that make us human (or more than). If this genre has exploded in recent years, it’s because it captures the free-floating anxiety in our souls as we grasp for ways to understand the profound, terrifying, and fundamental changes rocking society.

Writers have always been divining rods, dowsing for the future. So it’s not surprising that some of these authors, writing before the coronavirus descended and Black Lives Matter protests surged following the police murder of George Floyd, were eerily prescient in capturing elements of what lay ahead. They also provide cautionary tales of what awaits if we’re not careful.

Speculative Los Angeles is a new project for us at Akashic, an acknowledgment that in these real-life dystopian times, we crave the fortifying truth of stories that ask What if? then take us there in visions designed to warn, scare, tempt, laugh, and predict. Speculative fiction provides a wormhole into other LA worlds, but it also resonates with universal themes of good vs. evil and with how we live (and die) in this one.

Consider Lisa Morton’s alternate history pastoral. As her story opens, an agricultural realm called Rancho Los Feliz thrives and prospers, thanks to the oversight of its managers, a Latina and a Native American woman. But their Garden of Eden changes forever when a horribly burned man carrying a high-tech weapon staggers out of an oak grove.

In “Detainment,” Alex Espinoza creates a twenty-first-century changeling myth ripped from the headlines but rooted in ancient folklore when an immigrant toddler detained for months in ICE custody is returned to his grief-stricken mother in El Sereno. The mute, withdrawn child looks exactly like her son, but the mother swears he’s a replicant.

S. Qiouyi Lu creates a dystopian love story bristling with junkyard steel in which a young engineer driven underground by the resurrection of the Chinese Exclusion Act spends her days scavenging tech scrap at the sprawling Puente Hills landfill. At night she becomes a warrior, battling to the death in her robot “chomper” before cheering, gambling crowds. This propulsive, incandescent tale might be the first San Gabriel Valley steampunk story ever written, but it won’t be the last.

Stephen Blackmoore dives into demonology as real-life aerospace engineer, Jet Propulsion Labs cofounder, and Aleister Crowley occultist Jack Parsons summons a supernatural being in a 1940s Pasadena ritual. Aimee Bender examines a child’s obsession with the La Brea Tar Pits, that bubbling prehistoric lake of fenced-off black ooze that we drive past each day but barely register because it no longer fits into our worldview.

Luis J. Rodriguez imagines guerrilla fighters hiding out in San Gabriel Mountain caves making a last stand for freedom against a totalitarian America First government. In Duane Swierczynski’s pulpy horror and pop culture mash-up “Walk of Fame,” a father and daughter infiltrate the ruins of Hollywood, where psychic anarchists have declared war on celebrity, leaving the famous scrambling for that most precious of new commodities—anonymity. The showrunner of a runaway hit about teen suicide gets his otherworldly comeuppance in Ben H. Winters’s “Peak TV,” set on a Culver City studio lot.

In his futuristic noir story, “Garbo on the Skids,” A.G. Lombardo plunges us into a desolate police state featuring a tech-savvy cop and a desperate femme fatale. In Lynell George’s “If Memory Serves,” dystopia erodes the fabric of life in slow, incremental, and devastating ways for a young woman quixotically saving fragments of the past as she navigates a harrowing future in Echo Park.

Speculative fiction thrives in suburbia too, where Francesca Lia Block weaves a dark fairy tale about high school friends from Studio City who reunite as adults and realize the past was stranger than they ever knew. Charles Yu topples us into alternate universes lurking in a suburban backyard in his poignant family tale “West Torrance 2BR 2BA w/Pool and Black Hole.” In both these stories, normality is stealthily overtaken by a creeping sense that our safe homes and families are only fronts for something more strange.

And what about the robo-apocalypse, the artificial intelligence that we fear could soon decide that humanity is redundant? Kathleen Kaufman’s story, which closes the book, turns this premise on its head as she imagines a very different coda to the human race.

As with our city-based Akashic Noir Series, each story in Speculative Los Angeles is set in a distinct neighborhood filled with local color, landmarks, and flavor. But their boundaries are limited only by their authors’ imaginations. We hope these stories will inspire, terrify, thrill, and inhabit these familiar locales in entirely new, um, dimensions. What you hold in your hand is a portal, just waiting to be activated. Now it’s time to pass through the doors of perception and enter a strange new world, a city caught between shadow and light, past, future, and the uncanny present. You’ve just crossed over. Prepare to disembark into Speculative Los Angeles. We hope you enjoy your journey.

Denise HamiltonLos Angeles, CAOctober 2020