Dear reader,

Here we are again, another go around the wheel. It brings us great excitement to see this publication reach its first birthday! Though our first issue was released last November, its creation began a whole six months earlier, with a group of MA students chatting over Microsoft Teams and sharing their love for all things science-fiction and fantasy. As a result, this issue marks the one-year anniversary of Otherverse Magazine’s conception! I would say words cannot describe, but we are a literary magazine, and words are our business.

Naturally, we must start by thanking everybody who helped to bring Otherverse Magazine to life. It takes a lot of hard work to make a project like this happen, especially if it’s your first time doing it. So to all our exceptional editors, authors and artists, we salute you. We’d especially like to thank our readers, without whom our magazine would be as futile as a boat without an ocean.

If I may continue this boat metaphor, we hope you like the new sails! Our web designer, Nina Kenney has spent many a sleepless night making our beautiful website even more sleek and dashing than before. We aim to make more improvements like this over the course of our imprint — some big, some small — providing new content and expansions to the magazine so that our readers have the best experience when exploring new worlds. Of course, we won’t reveal all our plans just yet, but it’s safe to say that exciting times lie ahead in the Otherverse!

We at Otherverse Magazine are just thrilled to take another step in the journey of our publication with the release of this new issue. Personally, I’m still reeling over the success of Issue One, which was read by over 2,300 of you lovely people! When a dream has been living in the back of your mind for so long, it’s almost impossible to believe that it’s finally in front of you. But I suppose creating something from nothing is a feeling many writers are used to.

So, what can you expect from this issue? Well, from our cover (made by the always incredible Sean Bova), you may already have surmised that this issue will contain some stories around faith, aliens and the descent into darkness. Faith shows its face in different forms in some of our featured stories; sometimes it is a guiding force, driving the protagonist through a Viking battle. Other times, faith can be mingled with desperation, and the hope for a better life. As for aliens and darkness, well – we wouldn’t want to give away too many spoilers.

The stories contained in this issue were compiled through much shortlisting and debating that can only be compared to a battle with the Devil of Indecision. And I must warn you, dear reader, the war was hard-fought! After our first issue, Yasmin and I received a massive influx of submissions. So many skilled writers wrote to us with their wild and wonderful stories, which we took tremendous pleasure in reading.

 Perhaps, given the choice we were offered by so many brilliant writers, it should come as no surprise that we couldn’t agree on which ones to greenlight. It’s no exaggeration that creating this issue of Otherverse was, in the words of H. L. Gold in his first editor’s note for Galaxy Magazine, “the resolution of several personal conflicts”. But having faith (and a lot of meetings spent re-reading and debating one another), we eventually prevailed, and what you see before you is the amazing result.

The stories we have selected for Issue 2 excited us, bringing new worlds and ideas to the page. We are thrilled to share them with you. For this reason, we’d like to give our great thanks to Elle Boyd, Eamonn McKeon, H R Walker, J Fox, Natalie Blake, Dominika Olszówka and Konstantin Nicholas Rega for contributing to this issue along with myself and Yasmin Inkersole. We appreciate their dedication to the written craft, and for sharing their imaginations with our readers. This project is not possible without them. We also thank our editors for putting up with our emails, and our backers, whose donations allow us to fend off the snapping jaws of capitalism. If you would like to donate and help us remain unbitten, we’d be very grateful. Every coin we save goes towards the making of future issues.

The existence of this sequel publication is a testament to the potential of Otherverse Magazine in sharing tales from around the world, and we will continue to foster this potential as we release future issues. Let’s hope the wheel keeps turning!

Until next time,

James Geddis and Yasmin Inkersole