A Journal of International Science Fiction & Fantasy. Estd. 2015.
Mithila Review publishes excellent science fiction, fantasy, poetry, reviews, excerpts, and articles from award-winning and emerging writers around the world. We seek to publish stories that birth creative thought and positive action. Stories that accurately describe our world, triumph over fear, mistrust and despair, and guide the future. Because the world needs saving, and honestly, nothing seems to work better than amazing stories. Please subscribe or donate to Mithila Review to help us find, create, publish and spread original voices and impactful stories.
FICTION, POETRY & MORE
The Carpet Makers by Andreas Eschbach
In an introduction to the 1976 edition of The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K Le Guin wrote that the genre of science fiction was descriptive, not predictive. A novelist, knowingly or unknowingly, invents elaborate circumstantial lies to describe certain aspects of...
The Glass-Toothed Wolf
When it rained, only dust fell from the sky. The preformed people were out on the streets, fighting their little wars, but not much else moved under the suffocating heat. Baladrick needed to escape the city, but all the trains had been stopped, or not exactly stopped,...
I, Lilli Man
They call me Lilli Man. They call me other names too. Lilli Butcher, for example. Ever since I started the farm they began baptising me ‘Lilliputian.’ Everything was going fine… Until the day the policeman came. The allegation was pure hogwash. He said I had been...
Crisis
1. Arrival Nicholas landed at Vaptsarov Airport on a cold March dawn, three weeks before the country collapsed. With only a shoulder bag for luggage in which he carried his laptop, passport, and a guilty-pleasure romance paperback with the front cover stripped, he...
Sita’s Descent
Sita fills the sky, a woman clothed with the Sun. I watch as she descends through the atmosphere, bringing the light of day to the night sky to prove to the world her ordeal by fire. Agni-pariksha. I imagine her above the sea of fire, poised to dive. What did she...
A Time Called L’apatia
“Let me tell you a story.” The twelve-year-old girl looked across the room in confusion. Her grandmother was at it again; talking weird. “What?” the girl asked, trying to hide her annoyance. After all, she’d been waiting for a movie to come on; the kids in school had...
The Universal Library by Kurd Lasswitz
Translated from the German by Erik Born Publication Note As far as we are aware, the source for this translation is in the public domain, since the text was originally published in Germany in 1904 and the author passed away in 1910. Translator’s Preface Kurd...
Stories We Carry On The Back Of The Night
Sam’s father tells him bedtime stories about the people by the lake. Or, better to call them one bedtime story, repeated so often, it takes a different shape each time, a shadow puppet morphing in the penumbra of a flashlight. Sam’s father calls it his earliest...
Excerpts: Half of What I Say
“Who’s the most beautiful woman of all?” asked Padma, with satisfaction. He smiled. He was glad to be her truth-telling mirror. He was glad Padma had pressured him to attend the 10th Annual IAPTA Fashion Show party. He was glad Eshwar Pillai was in town. He was glad...
Partition
I started smuggling things at an early age: ice-cream for the chowkidar, cold drink for the sweating gardener and chocolate for the maid's kid. There was a sense of adventure in sneaking things out of the kitchen — basic things that were available to me...