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.

Publication Year: 2022