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ISSUE 15: CONTRIBUTORS
Rimi B. Chatterjee, Nicole Tanquary, Soham Guha, David Heckman, Neelu Singh, Carlos Norcia, Michael Janairo, Sonya Taaffe, Holly Lyn Walrath, Marco Raimondo, Sandi Leibowitz, David Memmott, Anne Carly Abad, Prashanth Gopalan, Sami Ahmad Khan, Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad & Ishita Singh
Cover: Original sculpture “Othello” by Cathleen Klibanoff. Background: Bailey’s Beach, Newport, R.I. by Childe Hassam, 1901.
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Sami Ahmad Khan’s Star Warriors of the Modern Raj: Materiality, Mythology and Technology of Indian Science Fiction
If Suparno Banerjee isolated four aspects with which to understand Indian SF – epistemic base, time of unfolding, space of action, and characters’ identity – in Star Warriors Khan has given us three more – materiality, mythology, and technology – with the additional promise of antekaal and neoMONSTERS possibly adding further critical axes to the discussion in the (hopefully near) future.
Review: Yudhanjaya Wijeratne’s The Salvage Crew
The Salvage Crew asks the question of what it means to be a machine, it also brings out answers to what it means to be human, at times through contrast, and at others through overlap.
Star Warriors of the Modern Raj: Materiality, Mythology and Technology of Indian Science Fiction by Sami Ahmad Khan
Sami Ahmad Khan proceeds to take us on a rollercoaster tour of all the fabulous worlds we SF writers have been making in odd corners of the Indian literary scene.
Arisudan
Water began to flood the room. ‘I told you it was a bad idea. The sea eats people.’
Packing Tips for Time Travelers
When you venture into the past, your clothes
must fit the time, so stick with linens, cottons, wool.
The Wall of the Worlds
A churning tale of self-discovery, masquerading as a socio-political metaphor, The Wall becomes a story where inter-layered narrative arcs – and themes – fuse.
The Echo Chamber
The keeper who took my voice promised to lock it into a wooden box until it has been properly reviewed. Still, if a good word comes back, I might not recognize it.
We’re Refugees Who Found Love Searching for Atlantis
We walked there in the twilight and sang skysongs
Our bodies were translucent and full of darkness
How we carried our homeland in our bones
Ceramics
The executioners grill letters and sigils
into every corporal surface,
black butterflies on her nails,
a sponsor, fingers curling like locks of hair
on her head,
ink paintings on her eyes.
The monstrous invading the ordinary: Reading The Best of Richard Matheson in a time of Coronavirus
A new collection from Penguin attempts to rectify this oversight by restoring some long-overdue recognition to the work of Richard Matheson.
Our Bodies Sing the Stars
Trees are a way Nature found to connect the ground with the skies. That’s also what we are, the Itumian, we’re a bridge, a connection; we are in-between.
Of Castles and Oceans
But the undertow was working against him. Matthew could feel it now, streaming out to open sea around and beneath him. Swimming against it was like trying to swim up-river. For every foot he pulled ahead, the water carried him back another two. The shore hovered like a mirage ahead of him, almost drowned out in all the lapping water.
Science, Science Fiction & South Asia: Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad in conversation with Sami Ahmad Khan
The more I read and think, the more I become wary of essentializing endeavours and labels, especially those which are transposed to a multidimensional singularity such as SF.
Aliens from the New World
We bring to you this issue so we may confront what Shakespeare described as our “mountainish inhumanity” as we come face-to-face with aliens and strangers in the stories and poems that are to follow.
Different Shores
He knew only what he had been told, that vicious Godless races peopled the New World and none could be trusted.