When we registered the domain name for Mithila Review in late 2015, we didn’t really know what we were signing up for. We knew that there was a need for a SF publication in South Asia, but we didn’t know what was exactly required to address the vacuum. When the first issue of Mithila Review came out, we began to see the work that lay ahead of us.
We intend to publish at least three interviews, two speculative stories, five poems, one personal essay and one review in each issue. We need at least 24 interviews, 40 poems, 16 stories, eight reviews and essays each i.e. work from nearly a hundred artists, poets and writers combined to complete the rest of the year on a successful note. That’s a lot of work!
A literary project like Mithila Review cannot sustain without support from both readers and writers on any part of the globe, and more so in the developing world. At some point in near future, we will be hosting a fund drive to enable us to pay our contributors for their work. Until then, we hope we can rely on your generous contribution and support. If we can survive Year Zero, it’ll be proof enough that SF writers have a future in Asia and beyond. You can help us make it happen!
Contributors to our second volume include award-winning and emerging SF authors: Ian McDonald, Kij Johnson, Indra Das, Arkady Martine and Vajra Chandrasekera. Other writers and poets include Priya Sarukkai Chabria, Seo-Young Chu, Mark Bould, Rabi Thapa, Arjun Rajendran and Bharat Iyer. The speculative fiction collected in this special issue present diverse visions of the future. The poetry and interviews explore the interstitial spaces we occupy across dimensions of time, history and geography. The interviews also deepen our understanding of the author in various stages of their career. Mark Bould’s short guide to AfroSF is a gold mine for those of us wanting to dip our toes in the uncharted waters of speculative literature from Africa.
We are immensely grateful to the amazing artists and storytellers who made our first and second issues possible with their contributions. We would also like to thank our readers who have subscribed to our newsletters and helped us spread the word via Facebook and Twitter.
We have dropped “South” from the name of our Facebook group: now it’s Asian Science Fiction and Fantasy. We are open to everyone interested in SF from and about Asia from around the world. See you there!
– Editors, Ajapa Sharma and Salik Shah
