Speculative City embraces the motivations of speculative fiction and integrates them into a focus of setting: the city. Cities instinctively draw individuals aspiring to create communities. Speculative City endeavors to elevate the voices of these communities through literary works that explore the potentials of their lived experience through the frame of science fiction, fantasy, and magical realism.

Speculative City first found inspiration in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We. We features a city enshrouded by a glass wall, a city that is monitored and controlled. Rather than acting as a veil to contain and limit, Speculative City looks to magnify exchanges, particularly of the unheard and invisible, in dense cityscapes. In this magnification, the magazine invites introspection, questioning, and confrontation of prevailing ideas and beliefs.

We call for those curious and laboring to envision altered realities.

 

WHO ARE WE

Meera Velu

Meera Velu

Founder, Editor & Publisher

Meera environmental plans by day and fiction edits by night. She’s still working on her superhero costume; her weapon of choice is the semicolon.

 

Yomna Osman

Yomna Osman

Contributing Editor

Yomna Osman is a curator and writer from Cairo, Egypt. She is a recent graduate of the California College of the Arts where she earned a dual degree MA in Curatorial Practice and Visual and Critical Studies. For Osman, research, writing, and curating are inseparable. She has organized and curated exhibitions, performances, and events in a number of institutions including CCA Wattis Institute, CTRL+SHFT Collective (Oakland), and Falaki Theatre (Cairo), among others.

John Wallis

John Wallis

Contributing Editor

John is a writer, editor and Windows Minesweeper enthusiast who has worked on novels, comics, film, and TV. A native of London, he came to the San Francisco Bay Area shortly before lockdown and has been trapped ever since.

LP Kindred

LP Kindred

Guest Editor (Issue 13)

LP Kindred is a Chicagoan-Angeleno writing, editing, and teaching from the axes of Black and Gay Identities. An alum of Hurston-Wright, VONA, and Clarion workshops, LP’s fiction is featured or forthcoming in FIYAH Literary Magazine, Speculative City, LeVar Burton Reads, Escape Pod, PodCastle, and Anathema among others. Kindred is a cocoa-founder of Voodoonauts, a grassroots collective addressing the underrepresentation and isolation of Black Creators in Speculative Fiction. When not cheating books by writing short fiction, he can be found lifting weights, watching questionable television, dropping bombs in the group chat, and pretending to be fancy. You may find him on ThatDamnedBirdApp or InfluencerGram @LPKindred.

 

Stefani Cox

Stefani Cox

Guest Editor (Issue 10)

Stefani Cox was guest editor for Issue 10: Afrofuturism. Stefani is a speculative fiction writer and poet based in Los Angeles, as well as an MFA candidate in UC Riverside’s creative writing program. Stefani’s work has been published to LeVar Burton Reads, the anthology Black from the Future, among other outlets. Find her on Twitter @stefanicox or her website stefanicox.com.

Devon Montgomery

Devon Montgomery

Founder, Contributing Editor, Web Designer (2018-June 2020)

Devon is a comic creator, active designer/letterer, and impassioned storyteller who does his best not to be a nihilist. He’s pretty sure it’s all in vain.