by Isha Karki | Articles, Reviews
‘When we shed the disguises that are Georgia and Eliza, and then the skins that are Lola and Tallulah, we are monsters. Fabulous beasts.’ (‘Fabulous Beasts’, 283) All The Fabulous Beasts, published by Undertow Publications (2018), is the much-anticipated debut short...
by Alison Akiko McBain | Reviews
Octavia Butler is a writer beyond definition, although she examined definitions quite well. The first book of hers that I read was Parable of the Sower, and the experience was electrifying. Never had I read speculative fiction so open about race and boundaries, and...
by Aditya Singh | Reviews
In his book The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh writes that we’re suffering from a crisis of imagination. In their attachment to the Cartesian worldview that arrogates all intelligence to humans and denies agency to the non-human, artists and writers have failed to...
by Mahvesh Murad | Reviews
There are a few texts that come up again and again in discussions of early feminist utopian fiction — Man’s Rights by Annie Denton Cridge from 1870, Mizora, by Mary E Bradley Lane from 1880-81, Arqtiq by Anna Adolph from 1899 and...
by Gautam Bhatia | Reviews
In his Introduction to The Architecture of Knowledge, Michel Foucault wrote of his experience reading Jorge Luis Borges: “…the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought, the thought that bears the stamp...
by Ajapa Sharma | Reviews
Margrét Helgadóttir and Jo Thomas began a series of coffee-table books on short stories about monsters from across the world. After traveling to Europe in 2014 and Africa in 2015, Jo Thomas had to step out, and Helgadóttir put forward a wonderful edition on Asian...
by Aditya Singh | Reviews
Worldbuilding can be a dull affair. An attempt to survey a place that isn’t there can often result in writing that isn’t readable. For M. John Harrison [1], a work of fiction relying on worldbuilding does not invite readers to the text with the idea that reading is a...