Sordidez by E.G. Condé
Vero has always felt at odds with his community. As a trans man in near-future Puerto Rico, he struggles to gain acceptance for his identity and his vision of an inclusive society. After a hurricane decimates the island and Puerto Rico is abandoned by the United States, Vero leaves his home to petition the centralized government for aid and seek the truth about new colonists arriving on the island. But in the Yucatan, Vero finds a landscape ravaged by an ecological disaster of humanity’s own making—the Hydrophage, a climate technology warped into a weapon of war and released onto the land by the dictator Caudillo. Amidst the destruction, Vero finds both desperation and hope for regrowth as he documents the lives of the survivors. Details about the colonists’ intentions emerge when Vero meets the Loba Roja, an anti-Caudillo revolutionary who imagines the renewed power of the Maya. Intrigued by her vision of the future and her unapologetic violence, Vero is faced with life-changing questions: can an Indigenous resurgence protect his beloved island? And what must he sacrifice to support it?
About the Author
E.G. Condé (he/him/Él) is a queer Boricua writer of speculative fiction. He is one of the creators of Taínofuturism, an emerging genre of art and storytelling that imagines decolonized futures that center indigenous Caribbean traditions and cosmologies. Condé is the author of Sordidez, an indigenous futurism novella set in near-future Puerto Rico (Stelliform Press). His short fiction appears in Future Tense, AnalogSF, Interzone, Reckoning, Solarpunk Magazine, and other venues.
Condé lives another life as an anthropologist of technology and advocate for sustainable digital infrastructure. When he isn’t conjuring up faraway universes, you might find him hiking through sand dunes or playing 2D RPGs from the 1990s.
