Kay Dick

Introduced by Carmen Maria Machado, the radical dystopian classic, lost for forty years: in a nightmarish through-a-glass-darkly Britain, they are coming closer .'I remembered how they began, a parody for the newspapers. No one wrote about them now.'Life on the windswept Sussex coast goes on as it has for centuries. But this is England through-a-glass-darkly. They are coming closer.It begins with a dead dog, shadowy footsteps, confiscated books. The National Gallery is cleared; motorway checkpoints demarcate Areas; the Art Centres are raided.The surviving writers, artists, and thinkers become cultural refugees, preserving their crafts, creating, loving, and remembering. But as subversives are gleaned by military surveys, cured of identity, desensitised in retreats, they make it easier to forget ...Lost for over forty years, Kay Dick's They is an electrifying literary artefact. As enigmatic as a nightmare, it is a cry from the soul against censorship and conformity, a radical celebration of queerness and self-expression - and a warning.

The radical dystopian classic, lost for forty years, with an introduction by Carmen Maria Machado. Published to some acclaim in 1977 but swiftly forgotten, Kay Dick's They follows a nameless, genderless narrator living along the lush but decimated English coast, where a loose cohort of cultural refugees live meditative, artistic, often polyamorous lives. But this rustic tranquility is punctuated by bursts of menace as they must continually flee a faceless oppressor, an organization known only as “They,” whose supporters range the countryside in a grisly mob of mostly mute, quasi-automatons. Moving in slow but deliberate concentric circles, “They” root out free-thinking subversives: the surviving artists, craftspeople, intellectuals, even the unmarried and the childless. As Dick unveils in ominous fragments, “They” are not affiliated with a dystopic totalitarian state, “They” are an unsanctioned multitude, the strength of which appears to lie not in official mandates, but rather in the swell of their ever-increasing numbers. An electrifying literary artefact—a lost dystopian masterpiece and overlooked queer classic—They returns to print in this special international publication brimming with contemporary resonance.