It’s fascinating the kind of relationships your mind and body develop as a consequence of your craft. In the case of writers, you develop a very personal relationship with words, where some phrases will trigger vivid emotions, while others will lay flat as nothing more than words on a page. For me, ‘labour of love’ is one that fell into the latter category. I knew it was a better way of putting things, but it wasn’t more than a phrase to me. How could something as tender as love do the labour necessary to push through vexing, tedious tasks? What does that look like, how does that feel?
After a year of working on Tasavvur with my amazing team-mates, I can now say I know now what that looks like in images, how it feels deep down inside. It doesn’t feel tedious or tiring or difficult at all, no matter the amount of edits or emails or meetings you have to go through. Rather, even on the most tiring nights, it feels exhilarating that you are fostering something so special, something you believe in with all your heart. Personally, I feel pressure to make sure Tasavvur thrives because that’s the only way I can perceive it. Tasavvur started with our belief that South Asian speculative fiction needed a space of its own. We weren’t sure what would happen, if we’d get submissions or supporters beyond our own circle of friends. And now it’s become something that can stand on its own, speak for itself. So let’s hear what Tasavvur has become.
In our one year of nurturing the platform we know as Tasavvur, we have been lucky enough to not only find a readership but more importantly, validate our vision behind it. And while we have been lucky to find readership amongst SF&F’s supportive community, we believe that for us to achieve the small milestones we have as a magazine, that too over four issues, isn’t just luck. We want to give South Asian writers a platform, but also a standard to aim for, and seeing stories like Dipika Mummery’s Tulsi or Archita Mittra’s The Green Man’s Wife featured in must read lists, having stories from nearly every issue featured in review lists (big thank you to Maria Haskins and many others on Twitter who continue to look forward to our issues) has been the signal we needed to know we’re going in the right direction as a magazine. Because we not only are we able to bring stories we truly love to you, but also help you discover talented writers. Additionally, we’ve aimed to reprint stories that are often only in print because we know that preserving some of the amazing speculative fiction from our region is just as important as being a stepping stone for newer writers in their journey.
South Asia has a rich culture of speculative fiction, and when we started Tasavvur we knew this, but we also knew that there isn’t a dedicated resource to help you discover those stories. That’s why we’re excited to launch our index! We aim to make this the penultimate index of all South Asian speculative writers and their published works, and it goes without saying that we will need your help. If you see a name or work that isn’t in the Index, please let us know! Also, please let us know how we can improve the index experience. We want this to be a resource readers enjoy using.
For those of us on the team, managing personal and professional careers, along with writing careers, building Tasavvur has been nothing short of a labour of love (there really isn’t any other way to put it, I’m sorry! Or maybe I’m not!). But, I think it’s felt so easy because of how well our team has come together. Our founder, Tehseen Baweja, had a vision that all of us were captivated by from the beginning, while giving us the lead to execute that vision. Our fiction editors, Kehkashan Khalid, Amal Singh, and Mehak F. Khan, have brought together their unique talents and tastes together to create a dynamic that gives Tasavvur it’s unique taste that so many of you look forward to with every issue. And while I juggle a few hats at Tasavvur, I am going to take this opportunity to say that I am glad I manage non-fiction with Mehak’s immense support, and the team’s general support and encouragement. And no matter how I put it into words, you’ll have to believe me. Believe me when I say it gives us immense joy to know that our work matters and helps other writers like us; that we are able to give writers the space that so many of us lacked years ago. You’ll have to believe me when I say that we are genuinely proud of every issue we have produced, including this one.
Issue #005, with the exception of one story, has shaped itself to be a refreshing ode to sci-fi in it’s different forms. Mother’s Nature by Evanka Weerasinghe is a dystopian sci-fi story that tackles the complexities of motherhood in South Asian cultures with a unique concept that we fell in love with from first moment we read it. Word Rations by Nazuk Iftikhar Rao is a soft sci-fi story based in a world where we have to think before we speak, detailing the delicate conversations that take place without words. Divination In Dark Places by Salonee Verma is another soft sci-fi story that tells of other-worldly entangled destinies and one that, when we first read it, we felt was perfect for us. The Questionairre by Neethu Krishnan is a dark fantasy work that is exactly what the title suggests, a rather clever questionairre with some lovely prose that lingers in your mind long after you’ve finished it. Our reprint for this issue, The Picture Of A Dying World by Nur Nasreen Ibrahim, is a haunting but beautiful story about and within grief. Our non-fiction, Illustrated Visions: Speculative Visions From South Asia by Rohama Malik, is a wonderful introductory exploration of some of the speculative art being produced by South Asian artists, and a shift into the wider world of all that is speculative and South Asian that I have been meaning to take our non-fiction into. And tying our issue together is the beautiful cover, Discovery by emerging artist Shreya Pullela, which carries an appropriate sentiment for us to take forward in the next year for Tasavvur.
We hope to keep nurturing Tasavvur so that through it both us, the team, and you, the readers, can discover the depth and breadth of South Asian speculative fiction and art. We hope to expand the ways you can discover this in the coming issues (stay tuned for some exciting updates). We hope that as Tasavvur grows in ambitions, we’ll be able to support it (Kickstarter coming soon!), because we know South Asian speculative work has many different forms, and we want to push the boundaries of how it can be preserved. And lastly, we hope that you continue to enjoy this platform more and more with each issue.