Amid the dizzying flurry of political news and global affairs developments in 2025, it might be difficult to imagine why we would need more fiction about imperialism, dictatorships, and the manufacturing of consent for forever-wars. After all, doesn’t our own world abound with examples of powerful countries exploiting and extracting from weaker ones, of autocrats (or aspiring ones) extending their tentacles into every aspect of public and private life, of empires lurching from one war to another in attempt to justify their continued existence, and of supposed authority figures and thought leaders falling in line?

Yet this is exactly what we see in the setting that unifies the stories in One Message Remains, a collection of short fiction by Premee Mohamed.