In Death’s End, the third volume of the acclaimed sci-fi trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past—better known to most as The Three-Body Problem, after the 2006 novel that inaugurated it—Chinese writer Cixin Liu lifts an already dense narrative, teeming with twists and dazzling inventions, to heights that defy the absurd. In the sophisticated web of events he constructs, unfolding across four centuries, the initial alien threat that seems to foretell the end of terrestrial civilization quickly morphs into something far more unsettling: everything humanity believed it knew about the universe, and about life itself, is fundamentally wrong. The unveiling of a deeper truth abruptly collapses the primacy, the protagonism, and even the presumed centrality of human intellect in the cosmos, opening onto an ontological relativism that spills beyond the very dimensions of space and time. Within Liu’s speculative engine, the human reappears as an insignificant particle in an ocean of ineffable, multidimensional, atemporal intelligences— beings impossible for the human mind to even conceive, let alone contain within the stubborn three-dimensionality of Homo sapiens.

‍

As further proof of this chilling cosmological axiom, Death’s End stages something astonishing, arguably the most brilliant and successful invention of the entire trilogy. The solar system undergoes an alien offensive as unexpected as it is catastrophic in its effects. Against the weapon deployed by an unspecified non-human intelligence, it soon becomes clear that no defence is possible: it is a tiny, two-dimensional sheet, roughly the size of a business card, intangible, faintly luminescent, apparently harmless, left floating in the deep space near Pluto. A sheet that suddenly activates, expanding until it becomes a vast, thickness-less, invisible plane whose slow advance toward the Sun reveals its lethal nature: everything that comes into contact with it is reduced to two dimensions—flattened, smeared, collapsed into a spatiotemporal anomaly that Van Gogh might have painted as The Starry Night. There is no escape. Salvation would require a spacecraft capable of travelling at the speed of light, able to reach the escape velocity imposed by the two-dimensional field—a speed that exposes the technological and scientific limits of Liu’s humanity, eternally caught between collective idealism, catastrophic escapism, and tragic individual heroism.

‍

In 2023, when Alea miraculously reached the end of its first editorial cycle, with six volumes published in Italian, we began, in the editorial office, to discuss the future of the journal. The last issue, dedicated to the late David Graeber, had intercepted a series of questions about the state of things which, far from finding definitive or comforting answers (we would gladly have spared ourselves this new chapter!), seemed to gesture toward a possible trail, tracks still fresh in a sinister, elusive present. This is how we reached the Lands Between: a territory brushed by eternal twilight, dotted with distorted, inhuman architectures, inhabited by a humanity that seems to have lost all spatial or temporal horizons capable of lending meaning to the real. A kingdom where the imagination and vitality that pulse through life’s biology and sociality are constantly frayed by the stagnant, worn, and corrupted power of an Empire that has devoured its own limbs. Time bent to the curse of perpetual decline. Earth, skies, and waters poisoned by the machines and residues of imperial blindness. The living transformed into an enemy to be subdued by the deaf, ravenous hunger of commodification, exceptionalism, and hegemony.

‍

Raising one’s gaze from the margins of this land, the clash between a present haunted by the spectre of itself and the disturbing gleam of possible futures is both grandiose and unsettling: a monstrous globe consuming everything it encounters, reducing it to a blur stripped of dimension: loss of meaning, identity, relations, desires, collective purpose. This is the Empire’s final desperate spell: an assault on the imaginary and the possible, made all the more brutal by the violence, repression, and falsehood mobilized by its dark elites to crown their dream—really, their nightmare—of grotesque, monstrous immortality. The shock wave of stagnation grows immense, disproportionate, sweeping over everything until it reduces it to a faded image. Escape is futile: its expansion seems unstoppable—the escape velocity from its force field appears to lie beyond the limits of the thinkable.

‍

So, one might as well surrender to this Long Goodbye, the interminable farewell of an empire decrepit and cursed from the start, condemned never to witness its own end; a spectre warming itself at the weak bonfires of a possible alternative world, though incapable of feeding the flame or hoping to see it one day ignite. Or perhaps not?

‍

Here enters Alea’s sortie onto the field. After the initial disorientation that, to be honest, had weakened our first attempts to explore the Lands Between, we tried to reorganize the entire editorial project, guided by an intuition that was, in a sense, paradoxical: the escape velocity from the dimensional upheaval of the Long Goodbye was immobility. Written on the whiteboard, the equation of the Long Goodbye gave us not a solution but a breach of understanding. We needed the courage to stay put, to take a grounded, immovable position, to hold a gaze carved into the precariousness of time. And so, we set out across the evanescent terrain of the Lands Between to become rhapsodes of twilight, fragile witnesses to stories inscribed in abandonment, custodians of the faint bonfires of hope whose glow awaits the embrace of new, more-than-human imaginaries. An anthropological practice that, in truth, refuses the inevitability of flight and instead reaffirms the urgency of a grounded ethnographic sensitivity, one that, in the multidimensionality of the social and cultural—unlike the techno-messianic fixations to which even the ever-imaginative Cixin Liu ultimately succumbs—can find the creative force needed to re-enchant the world and the future.

‍

This issue of Alea thus inaugurates a new chapter for the journal: an imaginative re-orientation that compelled us to profoundly rethink ourselves, participating directly—together with extraordinary contributors—in the challenge of situated storytelling and presence in times of crisis. Its narrative montage forms a constellation of original contributions whose variety of forms and perspectives produces a kind of long-exposure photograph of the Lands Between, revealing the specters that haunt it. I will not linger further and entrust the exploratory initiative to our readers. Welcome to the Long Goodbye—see you at the bonfire.