Editor's Note

Des­pite all odds, Brazil is go­ing through its most pro­lific mo­ment for SFF stor­ies. There are many pub­lish­ing houses and on­line zines pop­ping up every­where and re­leas­ing amaz­ing new stor­ies every day. At the same time, our writers’ at­ten­tion to the in­ter­na­tional mar­ket is in­creas­ing, and the in­terest for SFF in trans­la­tion as well. We can see it in some other ini­ti­at­ives such as Samovar and the new Constelación Magazine. With that in mind, we want to give our writers a first shot of having their work published in English, and to showcase to the world the talents and creativity that are bursting throughout our multicultural and multifaceted country.

The spe­cial Brazilian Is­sue of Strange Ho­ri­zons, re­leased in Septem­ber 2019, was the ig­niter to con­ceive Eita! Magazine. The art­icle “The State of Play of Brazilian SFF”, written by Jana Bianchi, explores and details this flourishing market in Brazil. At the same time, the foreword to the same edition written by Dante Luiz showed that only four Brazilians were published in the anglophone zines that year. Now, putting this together with the hundreds of submissions received by Strange Horizons for the Brazilian issue, there is a clear imbalance.

And so this zine blos­somed into ex­ist­ence, crowned by the name Eita, which is an in­ter­jec­tion spoken (or, more com­monly, shouted) from all corners of Brazil. It’s an ex­tremely ver­sat­ile word that can ex­press sur­prise, pity, con­fu­sion, dis­may or joy.

A di­verse and multi-tal­en­ted team was put to­gether, com­posed of people who have been writ­ing and act­ively par­ti­cip­at­ing in the Brazilian SFF com­munity for many years: ed­it­ors who have been in­volved with zines and an­tho­lo­gies, skilled trans­lat­ors, so­cial me­dia pro­fes­sion­als and tal­en­ted artists. All work­ing along­side each other and vol­un­tar­ily, to bet­ter show­case the phe­nom­enal works of sci­ence fic­tion and fantasy Brazil has to of­fer.

For the first is­sue, we re­ceived 230 valid sub­mis­sions. It presen­ted us the hard task of se­lect­ing only 4 stor­ies among many truly in­cred­ible ones. We feel that the stor­ies we chose rep­res­ent what we want to pub­lish. It res­ul­ted in a nice mix of dif­fer­ent styles and char­ac­ters. Our au­thors, Is­abor Quin­tiere, Miguel Dracul, Lais Dias and Thi­ago Am­brósio, were joined by the le­gendary Brazilian au­thor Machado de As­sis, from whom we present a short story never be­fore pub­lished in Eng­lish.

For our next edi­tions, we plan to pub­lish longer stor­ies. We also have tons of new amaz­ing ideas for this pro­ject, like pub­lish­ing more fre­quently, cre­at­ing fun and ex­clus­ive con­tent for our news­let­ter and maybe even get­ting into com­ics! If you en­joy this is­sue, help us pay our au­thors and dream of new amaz­ing plans by supporting us on Patreon.

The Eita! Magazine's Team