Week #38: Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean

(EDIT: You can buy it here.)

What happens when you take twenty writers and illustrators and ask them to imagine the future? Well, something fantastic and magical, you can be sure. We know because we did it. And the result is Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean, a collection of young adult speculative fiction—including six graphic stories.

Eat the Sky… is also a unique collaborative project. It brought together ten storytellers each from India and Australia with the brief to re-imagine the world from a feminist perspective. To think about the futures of girls and boys, men and women, of humanity. To go beyond what we know, to mess with the boundaries of the possible and the probable. And in this task, each of the contributors was paired with a partner from across the seas.

Some worked together to create a single story; others exchanged notes and ideas on their interpretation of the theme. The sixteen stories in this collection traverse to dystopian worlds and distant galaxies; they mess with history and travel in time; there is a fairy tale like you’ve never heard it before and even some Shakespeare. And if you thought a speculative feminist collection would be all about girls, you’d be wrong—many of the stories are just as much about boys.

The contributors: Kate Constable, Priya Kuriyan, Justine Larbalestier, Anita Roy, Annie Zaidi, Mandy Ord, Samhita Arni, Alyssa Brugman, Kuzhali Manickavel, Lily Mae Martin, Margo Lanagan, Kirsty Murray, Manjula Padmanabhan, Amruta Patil, Vandana Singh, Isobelle Carmody, Prabha Mallya, Penni Russon, Payal Dhar and Nicky Greenberg.

The editors: Kirsty Murray, Payal Dhar and Anita Roy.

The cover image: Priya Kuriyan.

~PD