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ISSUE 13: CONTRIBUTORS
Priya Sarukkai Chabria, Theodore Singer, Vanessa Fogg, H. Pueyo, Donna J. W. Munro, Hannah Frankel, Yilin Wang, Lynne Sargent, Mack W. Mani, Adele Gardner, Mary Soon Lee, Mari Ness, Ishita Singh, Gautam Bhatia, Chaitanya Murali, D. P. Singh, Tarun K. Saint, Rajat Chaudhuri and Jvalant Nalin Sampat
ART by John Glover
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Ishita Singh “All true knowing is mutual…”: Notes on Vandana Singh’s Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories
Gautam Bhatia A Delicate Magic: Iona Datt Sharma’s Not For Use in Navigation
Chaitanya Murali Avatar: An English-Italian Anthology of Contemporary Science Fiction from India
D. P. Singh Science Fiction Writings in Punjabi: The Contemporary Scenario
“The Genius” by Sara Backer
The Genius The genius is busy. She’s staring at a ragged alder leaf backlit by the setting sun. She sees its complex simplicity, fractals repeated in varying scale. The word scale invokes fish and symphonies. She hears salmon muscling upstream and tastes the cayenne...
Two Poems by Seth Jani
Green Thaumaturge In the forest, a divulged tire Has filled with fuchsia-colored snakes. They appear radioactive, or maybe fed With the blood of Redondo evenings. Nearby a hunter traps a hare In a small cage. He’s perplexed To find its made of glass, or maybe ice...
Notes on Indian Science Fiction: The Parallel Worlds of Jayant Narlikar and Vandana Singh
Jayant Narlikar. Photograph: Thulasi Kakkat / The Hindu. Vandana Singh. Photograph: ASU.edu. When writers tell stories in their 'mother' tongue, perhaps fiction becomes more real. After comparing Hindi and English translations of Jayant Narlikar’s Marathi science...
Bharat Iyer: Bug Season
Bug Season Bharat Iyer Simply put, paranoia tends to be contagious; more specifically, paranoia is drawn towards and tends to construct symmetrical relations, in particular, symmetrical epistemologies. — Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick I This was the year bug ripped through the...
Priya Sarukkai Chabria: Rai Parveen Mahal, Orchha
Rai Parveen Mahal, Orchha Priya Sarukkai Chabria Emperor Akbar summoned Rai Parveen, beloved of Raja Indrajit, from Orccha to Delhi. Her poetry and beauty captivated the Mughal court. She said to him: Emperor, only a crow or a dog or a beggar eats leftovers. Why...
AfroSF Now: A Snapshot, Seven Novels and a Film by Mark Bould
Suddenly, some time around 2010, people started to notice. Neil Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009) got four Oscar nominations and Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi (2009) won the best short film award at the Cannes Independent Film Festival. Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death (2010) won...
Kij Johnson: “I have learned to walk away from failing stories instead of flailing at them.”
Kij Johnson in conversation with Salik Shah: Your novels and some of your short stories are set in Japan. What drew you to the island nation? As a historian, I’ve always read a lot of women’s diaries and journals, and one of the liveliest and most intelligent was the...
Raqib Shaw and the Nostalgia for Paradise
Raqib Shaw deftly manipulates industrial paint, oil, glitter and rhinestone to create phantasmagorical images of violence, debauchery, and paradisiacal spaces filled with mythical beasts and fantastical creatures. Born in 1974 in Calcutta, Shaw grew up in a...
A Plan to Survive Year Zero
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...
Valley of Tears by Rabi Thapa
“Most of the stories in Nothing to Declare are located in a Kathmandu as experienced by young people. They go to school, drink and smoke, have sex, go abroad, and come back and get married. But the final story “Valley of Tears,” is a millennial conceit that seeks to...
Sanjeev and Robotwallah by Ian McDonald
In a review of Ian McDonald’s monumental novel River of Gods, the Washington Post called him “a writer who is becoming one of the best SF novelists of our time.” Certainly, he has tapped into the zeitgeist with his recent work, which charts the move from...
Arkady Martine: “What I am doing when I write – in part – is trying to formulate a poetics of exile.”
Arkady Martine in conversation with Salik Shah: You describe yourself as a “peripatetic scholar-poet: constructed of equal parts SFF and Byzantine history.” Your characters seem to want to belong to the past. They are wanderers who always return “home” even when it is...
The Epilogue of Flight 714 by Arjun Rajendran
The Epilogue of Flight 714 Arjun Rajendran Rastapopulous, for all his bonda nose, wasn’t clairvoyant. Or he’d have seen it coming, the silvery bindi hovering above the island in Flight 714, the portal it opened just outside Coimbatore, flattening acres of coconut...
Two Poems by Arkady Martine
Abandon Normal Instruments Arkady Martine There isn't any such thing as you. (And now there really isn't.) You protean exile! All narrative, all trick. All abnegation of humanity. A succession of images – apophantic messiah! alien traveler! – encompassing their own...
Two Poems by Seo-Young Chu
What is the maiden name of Frankenstein's creature? Seo-Young Chu What is the maiden name of Frankenstein's creature? In which year was 1984 published? In whose brain was a funeral felt? In which year was Neuromancer published? How do you spell the title of Theresa...