McSweeney's Field Recordings Volume 4Rough Waters and Reluctant Heroes

Investigative journalism meets speculative fiction in this must-hear McSweeney's collection
A body of water that looks like "a case of pink eye inflamed to geological scale." Smart phones that dictate your entire destiny based on probability. Packs of abandoned pit bulls that wander through vast, lawless cannabis farms. The fourth installment of McSweeney's Field Recordings is filled with these kinds of nightmarish images, the kinds that are revolting and compelling all at once. The twist, in this collection of recent writings from McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, is that some of these horrific scenarios come from provocatively imagined fictional pieces, while others are culled from true stories. From hard-hitting investigative journalism to contemporary literature at its sharpest, the latest gem from McSweeney's spans genres to straddle the line between fact and fiction.

What will our world be like in 2024? That's the question McSweeney's posed to writers for its 32nd issue, resulting in a swath of speculative fiction that brushes up along the swampy shores of dystopia. In "Raw Water", short story master Wells Tower captures the depravity of life in the desert alongside America's first inland ocean, where the oysters are as freakishly large as the characters' appetites. Sheila Heti imagines the near future as a place where technology trumps free will in her wistful story "There Is No Time in Waterloo." The 2024 Salvatore Plascencia imagines in his exceedingly witty "The Enduring Nature of the Bromidic" is nothing if not recognizable — it involves the great American bureaucracy, where misunderstandings and misinformation reign.

Complementing these short stories are two foreboding reports from the Panorama, a one-off daily newspaper centered around McSweeney’s home city of San Francisco. The landscapes that Jesse Nathan and Lisa Hamilton describe in their NPR news-style reports sound like they should be science fiction: poverty-stricken fallow towns, dusty and brown and dull due to lack of water, the stench of rot and abandon. Nathan exposes how massive marijuana farms are destroying the environment, and how government regulation resources are as tapped out as their natural resources. Hamilton talks to citizens of California's Central Valley, where inequality in water rights means that one side of the valley is lush and green, while the other side that irrigation doesn't reach slowly circles the drain. These pieces serve as an incisive warning — we must act now to preserve the land, so that further environmental devastation can remain safely in the realm of fiction.