The introduction does something the rest of the manuscript cannot: it explains where the title came from. The book grew out of an earlier project, Wild Futures, that had three parts — episodic stories, a scholarly engagement with the Viable System Model, and a political argument about agency — none of which would combine into a single book. The name arrived in that gap, and it arrived from outside Krishan’s own reference frame.
It is written in the first person singular, so it reads differently from the chapters: thirty of them are in the first person plural. That difference is deliberate, and worth checking against the rest of the framing. The introduction sets the terms the chapters inherit — what the book is for, what it refuses to be, and why Judy, who gets up again, is the figure the book takes seriously rather than the one who never took a blow.