Arkdust
Pain, hope, and love collide in this explosive collection of speculative fiction. Arkdust demands revolutions while seeking compassion and understanding. Alex Smith gives us abandoned Black Panthers, disillusioned queer anarchists, warrior queen grocery clerks, all fighting for a better future against sadistic superheroes and white supremacist automatons—while a high-heeled bag lady with utopia in her eyes leads the way. Worlds we hope to never see and only dare to imagine, Arkdust challenges and implores the reader to explore the unimaginable to make all worlds possible. As Samuel R. Delany says, “You should be in that armchair, this word-wonder in your hand, reading...”
Alex Smith is a Philadelphia artist and activist whose writing—from science fiction, to superhero comics, to music and art critique—delves into worlds often forgotten, inhabited by people often marginalized. His work as a critic has appeared on Bandcamp and Pitchfork, as well as in local press for Artblog, The Key, and Philadelphia Gay News, highlighting the strange worlds inhabited by gender, class and racial outliers. As does his fiction.
A founding member of art/activist insurrectionist sci-fi collective Metropolarity, curator of queer sci-fi and Afro-cyberpunk events Laser Life and Chrome City, Smith found a home for his noisy take on science fiction in anarchist community centers and on the pages of self-produced, stitched together at midnight zines and chapbooks. He’s used these platforms to read and present at Temple University, Moore College, Bucknell University, and The New School about sci-fi and its relationship to displaced Black and queer communities. Arkdust is the culmination of that work, weird and wild stories that imagine futures for the rest of us.
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