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ISSUE 12: CONTRIBUTORS
Malena Salazar Maciá, Toshiya Kamei, Deborah L. Davitt, Dean A. Brink, Drema Deòraich, Raluca Balasa, Dennis Mombauer, I. S. Heynen, May Chong, Logan Thrasher Collins, Holly Day, R. J. Keeler, Z.M. Quỳnh, Aber O. Grand & Michael T. Smith, Arvind Dubey, Kshama Gautam, Shirish Gopal Deshpande, Narendra Petkar, Lorenzo Latrofa, Massimiliano di Lauro & Salik Shah
ART Macrocheira kaempferi (1911) by Theobald Carreras, Wellcome Collection.
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Salik Shah This Extraordinary Being
Malena Salazar Maciá, Toshiya Kamei The Kiss of the Water
Deborah L. Davitt The Ghost Teas of Sakurajima
Dean A. Brink Flower Arranging at the End of the Japanese Empire
Raluca Balasa The Executioner General
Dennis Mombauer The Carnival of Human Nature
I. S. Heynen Sonya, Josephine, and the Tragic Re-Invention of the Telephone
POETRY
May Chong Social Media Manticore
Logan Thrasher Collins Glimmerglimpse
Michael T. Smith Kirby; Or Everything I Needed to Know About Consumption
R. J. Keeler Mud Dauber Wasp Nest
Aber O. Grand The Satyr’s Acolyte
Logan Thrasher Collins Electrocologies
Michael T. Smith Super Mario; Or, Everything I Needed to Learn About Relationships
Arvind Dubey, Kshama Gautam The Shuttle Took Off / और यान उड़ गया
Lorenzo Latrofa & Massimiliano di Lauro on Animating the Story of Migration & Exile
Crossing the Desert with Malena Salazar Maciá
America Under Siege: Creating An Alternate History with Dean A Brink
May Chong on Managing the Scorching Mess of Social Media
“Upshot takes place soon after the end of the Guatemalan civil war…” — Drema Deòraich
Making Sense of Absurd, All-Encompassing, Terrifying Super-Capitalism with Dennis Mombauer
I.S. Heynen on Building a Post-Apocalyptic World Where a Company of Assassins Reigns Supreme
Crowdfunding Status on Patreon
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Zen and the Art of Gaia Maintenance
"Big oil companies are either slowly dying out, or adapting […] Slowly, for the first time in two hundred years, CO2-levels in the atmosphere are falling." — a quadripartite prelude — —The crisis is big, my children, so big that the distinctions between reality and...
Trucker
Meet the last generation of human truck drivers before self-guided vehicles replaced them. Photograph: Andrus Ciprian Specs and Gretchen the Grunt and Okie Kid met for coffee once a week at the truck stop. Self-driving cabs would drop them off, then return to town to...
The Ones Who Scream America
It was early evening when he knocked at my door. I was sorting darks from lights. His black suit and badge and manner made you forget whether he’d offered his name which you’d now forgotten or hadn’t offered it at all. He said in the vaguest of terms I was a person of...
Horsemen
Wait until the rain pauses, we said. Give yourselves a break. Let the planet breathe.
Brighter Than the Last
they knew / a paradise like this / can only be built / by people like them
Paradise of the Abyss
Piedad launched herself over the city’s crater, from the heart of Paradise of the Abyss: a beacon of new ecologies twirling out multispecies habitats of topical flora and fauna, where creche raised Piedad could live a life of creativity and abundance.
School of Continuing Education: Excerpt of the Course Catalog
Lab Visits with Chimeras […] what it means to be / human, humane, inhumane, nonhuman, humanoid, posthuman, / but also synthetic, emergent, golemic, intelligent—
In My Utopias
The trees have overtaken the world again. We’ve had to learn to live in them, around them, to let their roots be ours. The heartwood of each tree is a sacred object, as it should have been for years. The flowers fill us with tenderness.
Hopepunk: When Hope Meets Action
A special edition of Mithila Review devoted to Hopepunk — a literature of resistance, which seeks to inspire compassionate thought and positive action.
“Hope” and “punk” are the two key elements that make hopepunk interesting and powerful. Characters who don’t quit, who resist oppression, and fight for justice, for change, for democracy. There can’t be hopepunk without an underlying and undying faith in global democracy and freedom.
The Rhythms of the World
As always, we’re starving to death. From our place inside the leather pouch tied to Aamsaa’s belt, our two remaining stalks ache with hunger, barely able to hold our withered green-spotted spore caps upright. We reach down with what’s left of our network of hyphal...
Harefoot Express
The sun rose magenta, touching the blinds and prompting them to open. Zephyr yawned, stretching his arms to the light that filled his bedroom. He commanded the south glass-wall to slide down. The canto of the robins and the scent of ripe saskatoons along city...
This is My Home
“Why did you kill the cow?” It hadn’t been my daughter’s first awkward question, but it was the first that I can remember. I remember it because it was the first time she hadn’t been satisfied with the answer I gave her. Her understanding of the world had grown, and...
Milkman
They called her the Milkman. They did so without understanding the origin of the word, or the gender connotations it had once held. To them she was a simple savior, the person who helped feed their babies when there was nothing left in or for them. I knew her as Sara....
Planet Democracy: Call for Submissions for a Hopepunk Issue of Mithila Review
Mithila Review is inviting submissions for a special global Hopepunk issue of science fiction (and fantasy) devoted to positive and powerful character-driven stories that imagine an open and inclusive tech-empowered democratic future for all people, species and countries on Earth.
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.