Alistair Herbert

Into the Ruins brings its four year run to a close with a final issue featuring a number of old friends offering new visions of our future. From a time in which any semblance of compromise is an excuse for ostracization, to one in which the dreams of escape into space clash with the harsh realities of making a living during decline; from one man's journey to escape alcohol and discover a new life, to another man's nightly remembrance of a former life through the final broadcasts of a big city radio station; and onward to a mid-twenty-first century ranch in eastern Washington and the sudden murder that threatens to tear it apart: these stories once again bring to life futures not driven by apocalypse or utopia, but by the erratic and grinding changes most often brought by the real world. Wrapping up with a review of the new graphic novel 10 Billion, and the exciting announcement of a new deindustrial fiction magazine by Nathanael Bonnell, this issue serves as a fitting close to Into the Ruins, as well as a promise of many newly imagined futures to come.

The world of today is a distant memory in many of the stories within, while in others the near future brings strange surprises. Baseball still reigns supreme in New England as the rest of the world falls apart, somehow never negating the false hopes of small-town citizens. In a Greenland remade by climate change, a mysterious girl transforms the life of a strange young boy. Meanwhile, a surprising message from another solar system may hold important truths about our own civilization-while in another story, the last remnants of a perished society await in a cave, harboring their own truths about the new world outside. These stories and more bring us ways of imagining the future that awaits us all, asking us important questions about the realities of today, and what they may become tomorrow.

Demonstrating the diversity of deindustrial science fiction, this issue brings stories told from both the human and non-human perspective. And between Alistair Herbert's succinct portrait of a future hunter and part one of Violet Bertelsen's sprawling novella detailing the lives found within the future village of La Vezita, this issue contains both the longest and shortest stories yet published in Into the Ruins. Two horror-tinged offerings from Daniel Stride and Daniel Soule-the former with a story of a forest with a thirst for human blood and the latter with one of rationalism run amok-and an adventurous tale of a special kind of magic from Clint Spivey help round out this issue. Those five tales coupled with an excellent and eclectic letters section closes out the third year of Into the Ruins on a high note.

This new issue of Into the Ruins brings with it surprises, new adventures, and at least one familiar landscape-all brought to us by writers old and new. Alistair Herbert returns one more time to the world of "The Change Year" and "Archive" to bring his triptych of the future to a close. Brian Koukol weaves us a delightful tale of the future in which the old world is brought back to life in a surprising way. Chloe Woods takes us to a light house at the edge of the sea and the dangerous visitors who come knocking, while Kyle E. Miller shows us a locked and frozen land of winter. Finally, in an exciting first for this magazine, John Michael Greer's stellar deindustrial science fiction story, "Winter's Tales," is brought to vivid, visual life in comic form by Marcu Knoesen and Walt Barna. Couple these stories with a tight and compelling letters section and an essay from Hannes Rollin on what the role of religion, superstition, and magic should be in deindustrial science fiction, and you have yourself one of the more fascinating issues of Into the Ruins yet brought to life.