The introduction traces the American fascination with the story of escape. It argues that, in the United States, escape emerges as both a white fantasy desire for freedom, as well as Black and queer practices of survival and coalition. Using a Black studies framework, the introduction explores the episodic, escapist, and Afrofuturist aspects of the escape story—from (anti)slave narratives to contemporary visionary fiction. Escape emerges as an episodic structure that is activated by the reader, with the potential to push against the agential individual narrative structure of generic escape.