Mithila Review Issue 10

By Mithila Review

Mithila Review is an international science fiction and fantasy journal founded in 2015. We publish literary speculative fiction, poetry, essays, interviews, articles, art, etc. from around the world.

Issue 10 of Mithila Review contains:

EDITORIAL

Ajapa Sharma — Editorial

FICTION

Alexandra Seidel — Tigerflies or The City of the Night
Rahad Abir — I, Lilli Man
Dennis Mombauer — The Glass-Toothed Wolf
Indrapramit Das — Sita’s Descent
Sarah M. Prindle — A Time Called L’apatia
Damien Krsteski — Crisis
Bhushita Vasistha — Lopamudra’s Wedding
Rajendra Shepherd — Dessert Heads

POETRY

F.J. Bergmann — New Spring
Lawdenmarc Decamora — Shoegaze + Suburbia
Alexandria Baisden — Life and Death on the Rocks
Yuan Changming — YUAN: the Origin of a Family Name
D.A. Xiaolin Spires — nakajiru
Sarah Ang — Ocean’s Child
Julie Novakova — The world is a stage, and the script must change

REVIEWS

Isha Karki — All the Fabulous Beasts by Priya Sharma
Sami Ahmad Khan — Goddess Sita Mutates Indian Mythology into Science Fiction: How Three Stories from Breaking the Bow Reinterpret the Ramayana
Jerry Jose — The Carpet Makers by Andreas Eschbach

ARTICLES

Sohail Inayatullah & Ivana Milojevich — Futures Dreaming
Joe Quirk & Patri Friedman — Seasteading: This Isn’t Planet Earth

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pidgin Studios
• Release date: Sep 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463659649

Mithila Review

Mithila Review is an international science fiction and fantasy magazine founded in late 2015. We publish literary speculative fiction and poetry (science fiction/fantasy), film and book reviews, essays and interviews from across the world. A hypertext of original narratives and home of the translated from around the globe, Mithila Review is also an inquiry into the process of translating and the craft of storytelling.Every issue of Mithila Review has been made possible by generous contributions from our readers, contributors and patrons. Please subscribe to Mithila Review and become a patron to be part of, nurture and support this open, diverse and vibrant community.What we publish?Mithila Review features speculative arts and culture that encompass literary and artistic works in the broad genre with supernatural, fantastical or futuristic elements i.e. science fiction, fantasy, science fantasy, horror, alternative history, magic realism, uncanny and weird. Learn more.What is Mithila?“Mithila is a referent. It is a symbol. It can speak to the times when we have felt that we don’t quite belong. It can speak of the times when we have felt the urge to lurk away and disappear or the times we’ve felt the need to stay. It can speak to the time when we liberated our anger and pain in ways that have only fed the creative river within us. Mithila Review is space for our collective celebration and playful engagement with language. We hope that it can speak in all kinds of ways.” — Ajapa Sharma, Editor

Book preview

MITHILA REVIEW

Issue 10 • September 2018

Editors

Salik Shah

Ajapa Sharma 

*

Website: MithilaReview.com

Twitter: @MithilaReview

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Community: Asian SF/F

Mithila Review © 2018. Copyright to art, poetry, fiction and non-fiction belongs to their respective authors.

Table of Contents

EDITORIAL

Ajapa Sharma Editorial

FICTION

Alexandra Seidel Tigerflies or The City of the Night

Rahad Abir I, Lilli Man

Dennis Mombauer The Glass-Toothed Wolf

Indrapramit Das Sita’s Descent

Sarah M. Prindle A Time Called L’apatia

Damien Krsteski Crisis

Bhushita Vasistha Lopamudra’s Wedding

Rajendra Shepherd Dessert Heads

POETRY

F.J. Bergmann New Spring

Lawdenmarc Decamora Shoegaze + Suburbia

Alexandria Baisden Life and Death on the Rocks

Yuan Changming YUAN: the Origin of a Family Name

D.A. Xiaolin Spires nakajiru

Sarah Ang Ocean’s Child

Julie Novakova The world is a stage, and the script must change

REVIEWS

Isha Karki All the Fabulous Beasts by Priya Sharma

Sami Ahmad Khan Goddess Sita Mutates Indian Mythology into Science Fiction: How Three Stories from Breaking the Bow Reinterpret the Ramayana

Jerry Jose The Carpet Makers by Andreas Eschbach

ARTICLES

Sohail Inayatullah & Ivana Milojević Futures Dreaming

Joe Quirk & Patri Friedman Seasteading: This Isn’t Planet Earth

Editorial: An Interlude

Ajapa Sharma

The 10th issue of Mithila Review comes to you after a long interlude. The word interlude, however, doesn’t quite do justice to the time between our last issue and this one. Interlude suggests a notion of passiveness — the idea that somehow a chunk of time hung suspended between two events. But can we ever conceptualize time as stagnant? Even when we don’t talk of time as a movement in a unidirectional sense as in talking about time as a linear progression, it is difficult to think of time as stagnant.

At Mithila Review, we’ve witnessed changes and shifts that may not have been conducive to the regular publication of this journal but have been meaningful to our own journeys as individuals and a collective. I often think of myself as an individual having cycles of contraction and expansion where there are times where I fold deep within myself and create meaning internally, and there are times where I unfold to the world and learn and grow externally. Either way I like to believe that there is movement, not always forward, but definitely movement. Often, there are times where we backtrack and do some things again like I am doing now — starting a doctoral program in America after having spent a substantial amount of time in a graduate program in India.

I would like to believe that between our previous issue and this one, each one of us was taking the time to better equip ourselves to carry our individual and collective visions more clearly and effectively. We have been working on India 2049: Utopias and Dystopias, an anthology of original speculative fiction, which will see the light of day early next year. We have also been building local and global networks to find patrons and collaborators to help us sustain this journal over time.

Coming after almost a year, this issue in many ways deals with time. The collected stories explore what it means for people, over time, to make the journeys they do, become the people they become, and have experiences they have. Speculative fiction often deals intensely with questions of temporality but stories and poems in this issue grapple in very complex ways with time and identity. Indra Das’s Sita’s Descent and Bhushita Vasistha’s Lopamudra’s Wedding reconstitute women of the Indian subcontinent’s mythical past into beings who temper any kind of simple notion of us moving into a linear, straightforward future. The non-normative temporalities in the stories work well to challenge the normative constructions of these women as gendered beings in the mythical sources that they are drawn from.

Sarah M. Prindle’s story A Time Called L’apatia delves into the circular nature of a time characterized by an emotive register. Such an emotion is simultaneously of the past but could very well be of the contemporary and how the experience of such a time could potentially transcend generations. Even when they do not directly address the idea of time, fiction and poetry in this issue remind us that each thing is forged through some conception of time, particularly our identities and relationships. D.A. Xiaolin Spires in nakajiru deals with a child’s relation to the parent. Likewise Yuan Changming’s YUAN: the Origin of a Family Name is about the personal relationship with one’s name, which has its own history, its own story of how it came to be. Time is ultimately that which allows us to tell a story; it is what gives movement to a narrative.

There are works in this issue that offer you much more to think about than time, of course. Happy reading!

— Ajapa

Sept. 5, 2018

Illinois, Chicago

Ajapa Sharma is the co-founding editor of Mithia Review, a journal of international science fiction and fantasy. She is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she works on ideas of self, identity and nation in mid-twentieth century South Asia. She has been affiliated with the CET-University of Wisconsin Academic Program in India and is deeply invested in teaching and education in diverse and multicultural environments. A recent graduate of the summer program at the Institute for World Literature (Harvard University), her poetry and nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, These Fine Lines, The Kathmandu Post, and Studies in Nepali History and Society, among other publications. You can find her on Facebook, Twitter, and Academia.edu. Website: ajapasharma.com.

FICTION

Tigerflies or The City of the Night

Alexandra Seidel

Harvest Moon; the leaves are turning and the tigerflies are hatching. They will live until the Cold Moon, then die again, rise again when another summer’s passed. Mother used to say that the tigerflies are the only thing in the world that is like us. And now she is dead, and I am alone with only the black and gray mountain to hear my stories.

—

Sunset came early today, or maybe it didn’t and I am beginning to imagine things. Why of all the wicked families did I have to be born into one of proud traders? And why did we have to move to this most cursed of all places? Why would anyone want to live in a city that is haunted by millions of tigerflies when the sun is up, a city where all life has been banished from sunshine to be carried out by moonlight? Yeah, I for one do not understand. Father tells me our silks shine better when the moon is up. Certainly, good for ballroom light, but we could have gone anywhere.

Yet we are here.

—

Hunter’s Moon; the tigerflies are here, and I am happy when they bring their light into the lonely nights here at the black and gray mountain. I have been traveling for the past days — there are things I need before the Cold Moon, food for the long sleep, roots to dig up, boil, and eat whole. Mother taught me how to measure the amounts of what I need by how much I can carry — do not take more than what you need, so rings her spirit voice in my ears. The black and gray mountain echoes with the wings of tigerflies. When I sleep, they come to be my living blanket. When I dream, sometimes, I think I can hear them dream as well.

—

Our new neighbors (mirrorbird traders with an amazingly long lineage that they presume to track all the way back to Calopia, the home of the manticore trade) told us that the first two or three weeks would be the hardest. You have to get used to staying indoors, get used to living at night. True, don enough protective gear to make sure that these damn tigerflies cannot work their way through it, and you can go out there by day, but who would want to risk that? Even back home in Beleros we had heard what tigerflies can do to a pig, I would not want to find out what they do to a human, not that there aren’t stories. Oh, the Trader’s Round is full of stories! They say when this city was built, it was done so with great purpose, the most beautiful city of the North it was supposed to be, or so the settlers intended.

And now, what is it? A place your family drags you to just because of a minor scandal. Pah!

—

Beaver Moon; colder still, but I am warm. The tigerflies are humming like my thoughts. I have seen strange folk these past days. They have not ever been to the black and gray mountain before. I look at them and can see that they do not know the land. They look different, their eyes are smaller, their ears are smaller, and both are strangely shaped. The cloth they wear was not made here, and none of it — not a single thread — was dyed with blood wort. But strangest, strangest of them all is a man who seems to know Bending and Weaving. None of what he can do is what my mother and her mother and all the mothers before her taught me though. He is weak in what he does, like a fading fire in rain almost. This is why he has not noticed me watching them I think. The tigerflies, without my telling them to do so, are hiding from the strangers. When they go to hunt, they fly away from them, up the black and gray mountain at my back.

—

The Trader’s Round is a sad little spectacle if you are used to the splendor of the market squares of Beleros. I am used to splendor; I do find it sad here. And even all the artful illumination loses its romantic flair when it’s the only thing romantic about being here.

Gods and devils, I am the sole heir! Why does it not matter that I am not ashamed of my ‘escapade?’ Let the entire city of Beleros talk about it, I said to my father, but no. A true trader mints his coin by the value of his name, says father, what a boring old man.

And I also miss my… escapade. We were lovers without being in love, true and true, but first and foremost, Atanas was the truest friend I ever called my own, he was devoted.

I thought of him today when the most curious thing happened to me. I left father at the Round, under what pretext I cannot even recall. The city was built to be big, huge even, but due to its infamity, much of it is uninhabited. I did not pay attention to where I was going, I was lost in thought of home and of Atanas, but my dreaminess was suddenly — violently! — interrupted when my left foot caught on a loose paving stone and I landed headfirst on the dirty street of one of those uninhabited quarters. I scraped my hands, but through some minor miracle, my robe is merely dirty now, not torn. However, when I inspected the offending pavement stone, I discovered that there was something under it. The thing under the stone was a bundle of cloth. I unwrapped it then and there — too curious, I know.

And it was a scroll that I found under the stone, who would have thought to find buried words instead of buried treasure. The scroll is made from a material I have never seen before, some plant, finely worked, and it does seem old. I cannot read it, but there is a familiarity to it: some of the writing is similar to the rune letters Atanas showed me. He told me — and of course by centaur law he shouldn’t have! — that the runes have been theirs for many generations, but that before — a long, long time ago — they were imported to centaur lands.

A random thought: would father disinherit me and adopt an urchin off the street if I told him I was going off to the Academy of Natural Philosophy to become an explorer or even an alchemist I wonder?

—

Cold Moon; the strangers are no longer unaware. One of them saw a tigerfly one night, a foolish little thing, late-hatched I’m sure. He went and followed it, and what happened was most likely bound to happen. Mother would have said it is like the turn of the moon, something that you cannot stop. The tigerflies ate him right at the foot of the black and gray mountain. I have not seen it, but I understood what happened from the tigerflies’ nervousness, and I knew it from the sharp and sour voices of the strangers even if I do not know their words. One night later, a few hours before dawn, they must have decided to go tigerfly hunting, a foolish thing. They had torches and nets and what else they thought useful. They spotted me asleep, covered by the tigerflies, and when they came closer, it was the flies that woke me.

I rose, and the tigerflies hummed their light into the air all around me. Unprovoked, the tigerflies did not attack, and they only stayed because I was not moving, and maybe because they knew no fear of anything now that they were so close to the end of their cycle. At first, the strangers seemed to show awe on their funny looking faces. Then, the balance of their expressions shifted, and even in those small eyes unlike my own, I could read the anger forged from fear.

The strangers came at me. I knew that if I stayed, they would die almost certainly, because a tigerfly will fight to the death if attacked. I knew also that possibly, I might die as well, so I ran to find cover in the shadow of the black and gray mountain. That night, I managed to escape and hide. The strangers have been looking for me ever since. The tigerflies are beginning their dying now, and while I have been avoiding the strangers (there are so many of them to avoid now) I have not had the time to gather all I should have gathered by now for my own long sleep.

It is not just the tigerflies dying that makes me feel something shift in my blood, and it is not just the Blue Moon approaching either. I notice that there seem to be more strangers here almost every day, hordes of them, and they are building a home for themselves here by the black and gray mountain it seems.

The mountain has always been my home, and it has been my mother’s home and her mother’s home, and the long line of mothers before her.

When the Cold Moon is at its highest, I will ask the runes for what to do, because I do not have the wisdom to know.

—

Of course I will not be going to the Academy. Not that it would not be fun. It most certainly would be very much more interesting than here, and the educated people there would most certainly find an affair with a centaur less offensive than the self proclaimed elite of Beleros. Not that centaur society is any better, being branded — literally branded! — and being sent away to seek redemption in his travels? Just because he was with a human? Where is the logic in that I wonder? And then he risks meeting me to tell me all that and has the audacity to ask me to be with him come life or death — just as if love had snuck up on me like a thief and stolen my heart too; silly notion that, trader blood is a good guard against thieves, I’ll give it that.

I keep the scroll with me. I’m not quite sure why… it just seems like the right thing to do. During the day, I look at it. Yesterday, I think I only ever managed to sleep an hour at most, I was just so… well, fascinated with the scroll and the script and with… with its history? I looked at the writing until the point where