Hoaxes and Medicine: Volume I, Issue 1, Summer 2025

This first issue of Speculative includes a short story of an imagined opioid-apocalypse by Dylan Rivera. Jeffrey Nguyen proposes a scenario where the cost of medicine becomes so astronomical retired-military must stage a coup to win care. A special section that will repeat across several issues will present unique interpretations of the Bigfoot myth. This first entry by Waylon Gilhooley considers what an artistic hoaxer might have done to pull off early faked sightings of Bigfoot. The first six issues of Speculative will include a sixth of three different serialized novels. Editor Anna Faktorovich's Abalones turns to mythology and criminal-investigative techniques to ask what monsters might be killing abalone-poachers in California. Hathor Darwish's Epistles of Sexist Theologians is a fictional re-telling of what about the lives of the earliest theologians might have led them to have the sexist beliefs their recorded writings indicate. And Oliver Evanson's Seven Absolutes explores the likely outcome of a C$1 billion competition among United Nations researchers amidst a global-heating catastrophe to determine what extreme form of governance is most likely to save the world.