Hello, Book Fighters! It's a new season, and that means it's time for a new seasonal theme: Spring Forward! For the next several week, we'll be reading future-looking stories, books, and essays, and talking about literary visions of the future throughout various times in history. First up, we've got two stories from a new anthology, edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams, A People's Future of the United States. Taking their inspiration from Howard Zinn's famous work of populist history, LaValle and Adams put out a call for writing that imagined the future from the perspective of the oppressed, the put-upon, the discriminated-against, and the marginalized. On this week's show we discuss two stories from the anthology, one which imagines a United States on the cusp of making slavery legal again, and one in which women's reproductive rights have been so curtailed that teenage girls sell condoms and IUDs on street corners.
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