The genre still remains largely a male domain, but social reformer Rokeya Hossain conjured up Sultana’s Dream in 1905, a feminist utopia named Ladyland where women ran everything and the men stayed in the zenana. Fantastic, 1977 (L), Aschorjo New Year Special, 1969 (C), Bismoy Science Fiction 1971.īengali science fiction started out ambitiously, infused by the larger spirit of the Bengal Renaissance and its embrace of modernity. His other magazine, Bismoy, lasted 20 issues but folded when his partner sold off all the equipment and disappeared. In an interview with them, he remembers how he would hop onto local trains and sell his magazines, compartment to compartment. He co-edited Fantasy with Bardhan and is now a sort of Obi wan Kenobi to the Kalpabiswa crew. One of those madcaps is Ranen Ghosh, still going strong. My biggest success is I inspired a few madcaps.” Ghosh remembers he kept repeating the same thing as if stuck in a groove - “You need some madness to do this. His Jules Verne and Asimov translations are seminal,” says Ganguly.īardhan, in his mid-eighties, has lost both his memory and his hearing. “I think his biggest impact was as a translator. Unable to sleep, he’d translate Jules Verne. He would wake up every night at 2.30, the time his wife died. In 1971, Bardhan’s wife died leaving him with a small child. “He introduced the Bengali to world science fiction,” says Sandipan Ganguly, another member of the Kalpabiswa team. Bardhan created his own mad scientist Professor Nut-Boltu Chakra, started the first Bengali sci-fi magazine Ashchorjyo in 1963, did sci-fi radio plays and set up India’s first science fiction cine club with Ray as president and an annual fee of Rs 6. “And those magazines are not available digitally.” They track down pioneers like Adrish Bardhan, the godfather of Bengali sci-fi, who in 1962 coined the Bengali word for science fiction - kalpabigyan, a portmanteau word stapling together imagination and science. “People forget the past,” says Ghosh’s friend and co-conspirator Supriyo Das.
But it also wants to preserve a lost golden age of little sci-fi magazines with big dreams. Kalpabiswa has had wide-ranging themes - Japanese sci-fi, HP Lovecraft, aliens. He is beloved, but Bengali science fiction also needs to escape the Shonku hangover. Shonku is more science fantasy than science fiction.” “But it also means sci-fi is stuck in the trope - young adult magazines, a half-mad scientist investigating some unusual event. “It’s the brilliance of Ray that makes Shonku so popular,” says Ghosh. In 2018, Ray’s son Sandip will finally bring Shonku to the big screen with Dhritiman Chatterjee as the nutty professor. Shonku was the brainchild of Satyajit Ray. “When I read Isaac Asimov or Arthur C Clarke, there was never a doubt the characters were foreign but any Bengali can relate to Shonku, the absent-minded scientist who doesn’t care much about money,” says Dip Ghosh, part of a group of crusaders behind the sci-fi/fantasy webzine Kalpabiswa (). Open Access funded by Associação Brasileira de Otorrinolaringologia e Cirurgia Cérvico-Facial.Yet, for too many, Bengali sci-fi seems to revolve around Trilokeshwar Shonku and his oddball inventions like the Annihillin vapourising pistol and the Omniscope. Its abbreviated title is Braz J Otorhinolaryngol., which should be used in bibliographies, footnotes and bibliographical references and strips.Īll articles will be published under the CC BY (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International). It is the official scientific publication of the Brazilian Association of Otolaryngology and Cervicofacial Surgery. The Brazilian Journal of Otorhinolaryngology is born from the 'Revista Brasileira de Otorrinolaringologia', of which it is the English version, created and indexed to MEDLINE in 2005.
The aim of this journal is the national and international divulgation of the scientific production interesting to the otolaryngology, as well as the discussion, in editorials, of subjects of scientific, academic and professional relevance. The Brazilian Journal of Otorhinolaryngology publishes original contributions in otolaryngology and the associated areas (cranio-maxillo-facial surgery, head and neck surgery, and phoniatrics).