The Girls from Pasadena

The Girls from Pasadena is available for pre-order! The book will be released on March 15, 2025.

Also: send $10+ to a Black and/or Indigenous person's mutual aid request and I'll e-mail you the book for free! More below.

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How do people at the margins survive the end of the world?

Do they survive at all?

The Girls from Pasadena offers up 15 provocative, unsettling answers.

• In Platformer, a mobile app that gamifies nationalism literally takes over the world;

• In Sim City, a young gamer questioning their gender identity reprograms reality, as well as their abusive father;

• In Transcript, seven genderless artificial intelligences exhort their creators to take the past (and future) deadly seriously;

• Artist asks why a pair of trans roommates would switch places with each other (answer: to take down a nefarious corporation);

• In (Me and) My Surgeons, dalliances with one's doctors are the norm, as is a 'deconstructive' procedure that promises eternal beauty;

• The Television Writer traces an alternate history filled with queer, trans, and nonbinary rebels for whom TV is a weapon of mass destruction;

• First-Person Shooter interrogates a high school's complicity in a series of mass shootings, both virtual and real;

and these are just a few of the twisted, transfeminist modern fables in Erica Rivera's debut short story collection. Each tale brutally disassembles our urban landscapes, virtual realities, and creative ambitions in order to peel the skin back on a technocolonialist hellscape lurking just around the corner.

Urgent, incendiary, and ultimately hopeful, The Girls from Pasadena is a rose-colored molotov chucked into a dystopian minefield, lighting up a path towards something liberatory beyond the flames.

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Author's note: I wrote most of these stories while living on the border of Pasadena and Altadena, places forever changed by the devastating Eaton Fire in January 2025. Altadena, a historically Black neighborhood, was essentially leveled, and both cities, in the heart of a deeply segregated area of Southern California, continue to be affected by pollution, displacement, and an uncertain future.

I'm self-publishing this book in support of the many mutual aid projects and requests benefitting those affected by the recent L.A. fires, and the many more mutual aid requests that are lifelines for Black and Indigenous peoples confronting the utter indifference and active hostility of the amerikkkan government towards their safety and survival.

If you e-mail me at [Work AT RiveraErica DOT com] with proof that you've sent $10 or more to a Black and/or Indigenous person's mutual aid request, I'll send you PDF and EPUB files of The Girls from Pasadena for free.