Pulp and Dust: How the Southwest Is Reinventing Sci-Fi From the Ground Up

Pick up almost any classic sci-fi paperback from the 1950s or '60s and you'll find a very specific version of the American desert: barren, hostile, a canvas for rocket tests and alien invasions. The landscape exists to be conquered or survived. The people who actually live there — Indigenous communities, border crossers, ranchers, migrant workers — are mostly invisible.

A generation of Southwest writers is done with that version of the story.

Across New Mexico, Arizona, West Texas, and Southern California, a loose but energized network of authors, zine creators, and small-press operators is building what some are calling a pulp renaissance — except this one has a distinctly regional soul. The retro-futurist aesthetics are there: the lurid cover art, the short punchy prose, the unapologetic genre thrills. But the politics, the mythology, and the landscape itself have been completely reclaimed.

The Zine Shelves Are Stacked Again

Walk into Antigone Books in Tucson on the right Saturday and you might stumble into a release event for Arroyo Futures, a quarterly zine that has quietly become one of the most talked-about speculative fiction publications in the region. Editor and co-founder Marisol Vega started it three years ago out of what she calls "pure frustration."

"I kept seeing sci-fi set in the Southwest where the desert was basically a prop," she says, straightening a stack of the latest issue — its cover a gorgeous retro-pulp rendering of a Navajo woman piloting something between a spacecraft and a traditional loom. "Nobody who actually grew up here was writing those stories. So we decided to do it ourselves."

Arroyo Futures now ships to subscribers in 34 states and has a waitlist for contributor submissions. It's one node in a growing constellation of regional publications — others include Borderline Speculative out of El Paso and Red Planet, Red State based in Albuquerque — that are collectively carving out space for what contributors sometimes call "desert futures" fiction.

The work is hard to pin down generically, which seems to be part of the point. A single issue of Arroyo Futures might include a climate horror story set in a drowned Phoenix, a comedic space western involving a Zuni trickster figure, and a quietly devastating novella excerpt about undocumented workers navigating a near-future automated border wall. The common thread isn't tone or subgenre — it's geography and the insistence that the Southwest's actual history and people belong at the center of speculative imagination.

Retro-Futurism With Real Stakes

The golden age pulp aesthetic isn't just nostalgia for these writers — it's a deliberate provocation. Those mid-century magazines and paperbacks were doing something culturally powerful: they were mass entertainment that smuggled in big ideas. Writers like Samuel R. Delany and Ursula K. Le Guin eventually pushed the genre toward genuine complexity, but the visual and structural language of pulp — the lurid covers, the punchy chapter breaks, the breakneck pacing — still carries an energy that literary fiction often abandons.

"Pulp was always the people's literature," says Domingo Reyes, whose debut collection Caliche and Chrome was published last year by Mesquite Press, a tiny Albuquerque outfit that hand-binds its limited editions. "It was cheap, it was accessible, it wasn't trying to impress anybody in a university. We want that back, but we want it to actually represent us this time."

Reyes's stories blend retro-futurist hardware — analog computers, vacuum tubes, chrome-finned vehicles that somehow achieve orbit — with deep New Mexico cultural geography. One story follows a curandera navigating a post-collapse Española Valley where the old healing knowledge has become the only functional medicine. Another reimagines the Trinity test as witnessed by a fictional Mescalero Apache family whose land sits in the blast radius. The prose is deliberately pulpy: short sentences, vivid action, chapter endings that demand you keep reading. The emotional weight is anything but light.

Climate Anxiety Is the New Alien Invasion

If there's a single thematic engine driving most of this work, it's climate. The Southwest is on the front lines of drought, heat, and water scarcity in ways that feel increasingly less speculative and increasingly more like journalism. Writers working in this space don't have to stretch far to imagine catastrophe — they're watching it develop in real time.

"When I write about a Phoenix where the summer lasts nine months and the water rationing has gotten violent, I'm not writing fantasy," says Phoenix-based writer and activist Carmen Tso, whose serialized story The Salt River Protocols has been running in Borderline Speculative for two years. "I'm writing maybe fifteen years ahead. That's a weird place to be as a fiction writer."

Tso's work is also notable for centering Indigenous futurity — a term borrowed from academic discourse but increasingly adopted by genre writers to describe stories that imagine Indigenous communities not as victims of apocalypse but as architects of survival and renewal. It's a corrective to a long tradition of post-apocalyptic fiction in which Indigenous cultures are either absent or exist purely as mystical guides for white protagonists.

"We've survived multiple apocalypses already," Tso says flatly. "Colonization was an apocalypse. The dam projects were an apocalypse. We know how to keep going. That's actually a pretty interesting premise for a story."

The Small Press Infrastructure

None of this happens without the unglamorous work of small publishers willing to operate on razor-thin margins. Mesquite Press, which publishes Reyes and several other regional speculative writers, runs out of a converted garage in Albuquerque's South Valley. Its founder, a former offset printer named Gil Archuleta, learned bookbinding from YouTube tutorials and still fulfills most orders himself.

"We're not going to make anyone rich," Archuleta says, laughing. "But we're building something real. People drive from Santa Fe to pick up their copies in person. That's not nothing."

The economics are genuinely difficult. Print runs are small, distribution is mostly direct-to-reader, and the writers are largely unpaid or minimally compensated. But the community infrastructure around the work — the release events, the convention panels, the increasingly active online spaces — suggests something durable is forming.

Vega at Arroyo Futures is cautiously optimistic. "Every few months someone asks if we're going to go digital-only to save money," she says. "And every time, our readers push back hard. They want the physical thing. They want to hold it. There's something about a zine that a PDF just can't do."

The neon glow of pulp sci-fi's golden age has always had a certain romance to it — a fantasy of the future built from chrome and optimism. The Southwest's new generation of speculative writers is keeping the neon on, but rewiring what's behind it. The future they're building looks a lot more like the place they actually live.