Tractor Beam is a “soilpunk” sci-fi magazine with psychedelic design that teleports you to another world

Some literary magazines, like Heavy Traffic, are as simple as they come, drawing focus on the pure written word. Others, like the brilliant Tractor Beam, are an interactive art object as well as a riveting reading experience. Just like the name of the mag suggests, opening up Tractor Beam’s website is a portal – when you slide down Tractor Beam’s phantasmagoric array of illustration, web design and surrealist fiction, another world opens up.

The publication is a Brooklyn-based speculative fiction collection that circles new themes each time, surrounding anti-apocalyptic futures rooted in soil, food and farming – known as soilpunk. The influences are vast: Imagine 2200, which publish stories about the next 180 years of climate progress, and The Whole Earth Catalog, as well as 70s sci-fi paperbacks. Co-founded and edited by Claire Gustavson and Lana Z Porter (and supported by Tractor Beverage Company, an organic craft beverage company with a commitment to regenerative agriculture) the digital (and occasionally print) magazine publishes short stories, comics, illustrations and expert commentary.

Tractor Beam’s goal is to ‘bring sci-fi back to the ground’ as the website states. “Tractor Beam started by questioning how soil-as-technology might shape future visions of life on Earth. History shows that fictional futures are a blueprint for actual futures,” says Claire. The newest issue is all about the underground, a theme that writers can truly dig into. “We were also drawn to the literal underground: soil is where life and death converge. Tractor Beam is a publication predicated on change, and Underground may be our most radical soilpunk issue yet.”

Each time the editors set the theme of an issue, the team has a loose set of aesthetics references in mind. For Underground, it was protest art, signage from agricultural and land-labour movements, folk art, soil strata and degradation. Once the stories are selected, art director (and US editor-at-large for It's Nice That) Elizabeth Goodspeed pairs them with commissioned illustrators that explicitly align with the visual references. “Is a story moody? Does it depict a certain niche animal, location or plant?” says Elizabeth. “I try not to prescribe too much. The best outcomes come when the illustrator pushes the idea somewhere I wouldn’t expect.”

Rather than focusing on distant galaxies, Tractor Beam mines the rich ores of Earth’s own aesthetics, and that’s nutritional for the stories. Earth and alternative visions of our planet are “a materially buried and colourful place” says Elizabeth, and stories with taglines such as ‘could your time travelling bog-boyfriend fight gentrification with peat moss?’ is a dream brief for the imaginative brains behind the online magazine. Some stories are destined for a comic format, so Tractor Beam will work with authors to bring that visual potential to life, such as Soil Na Baba, written by Solape Adetutu Adeyemi and illustrated by Tina Tona.

Tractor Beam’s visual identity is one and the same with the magazine’s content: obsessed with soil. Claire and Lana brought in Out Of Office, a creative partnership between Elana Schlenker and Mark Pernice, to fulfill the vision. “In the context of a web experience, with inherently vertical navigation, moving down through the strata underscores the conceit of digging deeper – into the many rich stories the publication presents and into the Earth itself,” says Mark. The website’s language of graphic, strata-inspired layers fold into the brand’s wordmark and stack across the website. Stories often have annotations made by readers (a bit like lyric database Genius) so that readers can connect with other readers’ perspectives. “This feels uniquely well-suited to a web experience, where links within the annotations can lead seamlessly down rabbit holes of exploration. At the same time, we built in a lot of flexibility around how readers could choose to engage with this information, including allowing them to turn it off entirely – it doesn’t have to be a one size fits all experience,” says Lana.