New story day! I’m so delighted to share my first publication of 2026, a novelette called “On the Autonomy of Whales” which is part of the wonderful FIYAH’s spring 2026 issue! You can pick it up here: https://fiyahlitmag.com/shop/issues/2026-issues/fiyah-38/

One sentence summary of “On the Autonomy of Whales”: A mother whose brilliant child developed an app enabling humans to communicate with orcas explains to a reporter her involvement and relationship with a whale who revealed she didn’t want to have a calf, even to save her endangered species.

This is my first science fiction story in a long while; most of my work of late has been fantasy (my most frequent genre) or horror (now coming in at a strong second). It’s a near-future story, set in an unspecified year after the 2050s: my narrator, Dessa, notes the story’s current US president has a lot of work ahead of them in trying to fix the mess “the far-right government of the 2050s” left behind.

I wrote the story’s earliest drafts in summer of 2024, before the US’s 2024 election. I think it shows! In the story, NOAA, as well as the EPA and NPS, have all been replaced with by a new organization now called GECA, for “Green Earth Conservation Administration.” (There’s a side note that for a couple of months, it was actually “God’s Green Earth Conservation Administration,” till the then-far-right government decided, in a rather mercenary manner, to axe “God’s” in hopes lefties would confuse it with various New Green Deal initiatives.)

Anyway, in this story, the far-right government has been ousted from power, but there remains a lot of cleanup to do, and so if a particular department is functioning well-enough, such as GECA, getting it wholly straightened out is a lower priority.

Again, I wrote the story before November 5, 2024. At the time I was more optimistic about how the election would turn out. But I think I also wanted to tell myself a story of societal survival, no matter how rough the journey to get there.

(Note: I also wrote the first draft of this newsletter a couple of weeks ago, before the latest TACO event of threatening war crimes in the early morning only to back down again by evening. Almost two years after I first wrote this story, I still want stories of societal survival, because we need them. We need reminders that the world has survived despotic rulers before. A simultaneously alarming and comforting aspect of history is that we are not, in actuality, living in unprecedent times.)

Anyway, with the pre-election pallor of both dread and hope flavoring my drafting, I wanted to present a mix of optimism wherein technology is used for good (whale communication, woohoo! Nanobots that can cleanse a body, albeit a whale’s, from neurotoxins, yes!) amid abuses (what if we [governmental ‘we’] can use the nanobots to force whales into wanting to be parents?).

Because that’s where I see us now, really: many innovations that have the power to make life better for a lot of people, particularly in terms of medical breakthroughs, like this promising new treatment for Parkinson’s https://parkinsonsnewstoday.com/news/japan-grants-conditional-approval-amchepry-parkinsons/, exist amid parallel initiatives that will make things worse for millions, such as the various attacks on public health (I mean, how many links can I provide about the various disastrous policy changes of the current US admin? I’ll let this one summarize. https://www.newsweek.com/us-trump-administration-public-health-emergency-international-concern-warn-researchers-11734250)

Even so, it’s strange to me, having this story published now, in our current awful timeline. Because if we combine our current reality with the story’s reality, would this mean that the far-right government of the 2020s that destroyed vast infrastructure and organizations and set back, by decades, climate policy and progress was momentarily ousted? Only for another to return in the 2050s?

It takes so much more work to build something up than it does to destroy it. Optimistically, if we US citizens manage to overcome voter suppression and vote ourselves free of this, first with a rebalancing power at the mid-terms and ideally again in 2028, would enough be built back up to withstand another wave of far-right government in the 2050s?

(Another addition post TACO Tuesday, April 7: I mean, we are WELL past the point where the 25^th Amendment should be invoked. Well well WELL past it. I am unsure our craven Congress, along with the VP, will get us there, however.)

I almost feel that with the sort of timeline mentioned above, “Autonomy” presents too rosy a view. But, like Dessa, and much as I wrote in my past newsletter about my forthcoming book The Upper Tentacle, as a parent I can’t afford despair. I cannot look at my daughter and say, “Welp, things are terrible and are going to stay terrible or possibly get even worse in ways we can’t fathom, sorry.”

I have to find spots of hope, even it’s the equivalent of focusing on one whale, and one family, at a time. Because in the end, that’s all Dessa does, all she can do: help this one whale, and help support her child. Societies are fixed this way, with so many steps backward even amid the striving forward. It’s the continuing to strive forward that’s most important.

For anyone who picks up this issue of FIYAH, I hope you enjoy it, my story included. And I hope you continue to resist and stay strong, to help usher in better days ahead.

--Amanda