First Contact

Zefram Cochrane^[1] was a misfit, a beautiful disaster of human ambition, and his batshit experiment cracked open the sky and introduced our lonely little species to the cosmic neighborhood. He didn't ask permission. He just did it.

Cough up your coordinates and every week we’ll drop original work straight into your inbox—musicians, writers, visual artists, digital alchemists, and heretics from the heart of Middle America. Work made here and now, by people asking what the hell we're doing on this rock hurtling through space. And yeah, we've got opinions.

This zine is curated, but the door's open: submit your original art and cultural provocations. Keep it real, keep it human-made (we're still figuring out what that means in 2025—so if you've got thoughts, let’s talk about it.

Check submission guidelines for specs here. And listen, this ain’t no orange-grift, artists deserve to eat. Selected work gets $10 cash money plus a $10 book credit at Prospero's. The tactile, hold-it-in-your-hands print zine [Issue 1], loaded with fiction, poetry, video, creative nonfiction, interviews from 23 Middle-American makers— can already be found at Prospero's.

Read it. Subscribe. Spread the word.

Like Zefram standing in front of that warp drive, we're staring down a future that could go spectacularly right or catastrophically wrong. Might as well make some art about it.

Peace, Dante