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adrienne maree brown

Grievers is the story of a city so plagued by grief that it can no longer function.

Dune’s mother is patient zero of a mysterious illness that stops people in their tracks—in mid-sentence, mid-action, mid-life—casting them into a nonresponsive state from which no one recovers. Dune must navigate poverty and the loss of her mother as Detroit’s hospitals, morgues, and graveyards begin to overflow. As the quarantined city slowly empties of life, she investigates what caused the plague, and what might end it, following in the footsteps of her late researcher father, who has a physical model of Detroit’s history and losses set up in their basement. She dusts it off and begins tracking the sick and dying, discovering patterns, finding comrades in curiosity, conspiracies for the fertile ground of the city, and the unexpected magic that emerges when the debt of grief is cleared.

AK Press

Black Dawn

Grievers: (Grievers Trilogy, Book 1)

Margaret Killjoy

Dimos Horacki is a Borolian journalist and a cynical patriot, his muckraking days behind him. But when his newspaper ships him to the front, he’s embedded in the Imperial Army and the reality of colonial expansion is laid bare before him. His adventures take him from villages and homesteads to the great refugee city of Hronople, built of glass, steel, and stone, all while a war rages around him. The empire fights for coal and iron, but the anarchists of Hron fight for their way of life. A Country of Ghosts is a novel of utopia besieged and a tale that challenges every premise of contemporary society.

Bea Flowers

A Country of Ghosts

★ "brown’s sensational second contribution to AK Press’s Black Dawn series.... Equally thrilling and thought-provoking, this will put readers in mind of speculative greats like Octavia Butler and Samuel R. Delaney." —Publishers Weekly (starred review) 

The search for hope and community in death and desolation. 

In the second installment of the Grievers Trilogy, adrienne maree brown brings to bear her background as an activist rooted in Detroit. The pandemic of Syndrome H-8 continues to ravage the city of Detroit and everyone in Dune's life. In Maroons, she must learn what community and connection mean in the lonely wake of a fatal virus. Emerging from grief to follow a subtle path of small pleasures through an abandoned urban landscape, she begins finding other unlikely survivors with little in common but the will to live. Together they begin to piece together the puzzle of their survival, and that of the city itself.

Maroons: A Grievers Novel (Grievers Trilogy, Book 2)

S.J. Klapecki

A hard science-fiction space opera with a queer protagonist.

 

Sixty million miles from Earth, in the orbiting city of Station Six, work still sucks. Max is a dockyard worker (with an illegal sideline in hacking and cybersurgery) in the company town of the future. When the LMC Corporation announces its Automated Future Plan, which will turn Station Six into a vacation destination with as few human personnel as needed to stay functional, Max has had enough. They rise from their complacency and joins forces with an underground revolutionary cell as all hell breaks loose. S.J. Klapecki's debut novel about galactic class struggle against impossible odds delivers action, intrigue, and politics, as Max and their friends face constant surveillance, raids, and armored rent-a-cops. Station Six is a story of battling against exploitation, fighting capitalist moguls, union solidarity, and finding hope in the darkest times.

Station Six

Aric McBay

On a mysterious green planet renewed by fire, vibrant collectivist communities have long lived in harmony with both its strange ecosystem and each other—until the day imperialist forces arrive.

Raised in one of the non-hierarchical nomadic societies on the planet of Germinal, young Char and her family tend to this commons, rich in culture and biodiversity, through principles of reciprocity, ritual, and attention to the balance of their ecosystem. But they must forever travel to stay just ahead of the natural phenomenon that marks their world: a wall of fire that approaches like clockwork, bringing both loss and renewal with it. She is the first to spot the arrival of landing vessels, and soon her way of life is upended by militaristic invaders whose intentions are far beyond her worldview.

Graft is a captive “servitor” and personal attendant to the Conquis, the leader of the vanguard forces in the campaign to seize control of the distant planet. As the last survivor of a culture annihilated by conquest, Graft sees how unprepared Char and her people are to deal with the invasion. When one unsettling discovery leads to another, the newcomers find the nature of this new land troubling and its denizens odd—perhaps even nonhuman. The mission soon turns into something more menacing, and the inhabitants of the violated utopia must learn how to defend themselves or lose everything. 

Flowering with possible new ways of life, Inversion is a tale of social struggle set in a completely unique universe, whose unexpected nature will surprise and delight. Aric McBay weaves a tale in the visionary spirit of Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed.

Inversion

AK Press is pleased to announce the Black Dawn fiction series! Honoring anarchist traditions while also remembering the great Octavia E. Butler, Black Dawn seeks to explore themes that do not reinforce dependency on oppressive forces (the state, police, capitalism, elected officials) and will generally express the values of antiracism, feminism, anticolonialism, and anti-capitalism. We are for queerness, Blackness, antifascism, and for both dreaming and building better worlds. We believe the voices of the disenfranchised MUST be heard and are essential in establishing a society in which no one is allowed or desires to be placed in positions of power over others. With its natural creation of alternate universes and world-building, speculative fiction acts as a perfect tool for imagining various avenues that can be pursued to bring forth a just and free world. Agents and authors are encouraged to submit science fiction, fantasy, steampunk, horror, and mystery works of 25,000 to 55,000 words to fictionsubmissions@akpress.org. Welcome, friends, to Black Dawn!

Black Dawn - The book series

Black Dawn - The book series

Black Dawn books in order

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