This issue is full of tales of unlikely heroes: defiant champions, artists or artisans who don’t let society’s expectations limit their creativity, mismatched partners, heroines who make their own stories, unexpected researchers, and survivors who speak out and won’t be crushed or mediocre. It is full of voices we were not meant to hear, beauty we were not meant to see.
Mothers, daughters and lovers have to fight for themselves (whether or not there are men in their lives); girls with the perspective of seeing the world from the moon still struggle to be taken seriously by the authorities in mapmaking; an immortal queen knows what invisible courage and suffering means; a middling contestant proves Butler’s argument that persistence is worth more than “innate” talent; teenage girls have to fight dragons if there are no knights available.
Children have to stand up and fight for the Earth because we have failed them, have been failing them for generations.
This issue is dedicated to the unlikely heroes, the invisible warriors, the strikers who would much rather be in school.
