Janus
15x22cm
32 pages
150 copies
glossy cover
images texts:Irini Karayannopoulou
design:SEBR
A colonised planet full of personal, psychological and historical misunderstandings. Spacemen, moonscapes, unicorns, armored characters. Are there any new plots under the sun? With female science fiction heroes so scarce, it’s always gratifying to come across them. Our world on the brink of self-destruction. Everything is either permanent and unchanging or broken and irreplaceable. The accidental martyrdom of an innocent professor of pornography. Intergalactic buses broadcast erotic thoughts to passengers at night. The process is endlessly replicated in factories across the nation. Almost as if we existed in corners of the same pale planet far removed from one another, will our paths eventually cross? I must be born into a human body in order to contact and help you. Is mortal life only a preparation for another, more spiritually gratifying one? Science fiction is like that, awful things happen, millions of people come to a sticky end, but the main characters just carry on, cool and collected. Are fantasies of world catastrophe more a wish not to die alone rather than a prophetic vision? (I detect little to zero feminism in fairy tales) -Is it utterly coincidential? An alternate universe might exist only if we work to create it. Janus was the god of transitions and new beginnings in Roman mythology. He was depicted as having two faces looking at opposite directions, one towards the past and one towards the future. Janus was responsible for motion, changes and time. He was present in the beggining of the world and presided over the creation of life and the birth of gods and religion. In the 1970’s there were two magazines named Janus. The first and longest running one was edited in London and contained s&m and spanking erotica. The second Janus was a feminist science fiction fanzine edited in Madison, Wisconsin. It was highly associated with WisCon, the city’s science fiction convention. Irini was inspired by both editions in order to create her own Janus femzine, edited and exhibited on the occasion of #Lipiu exhibition at A-Dash, Athens. The project was curated by Christina Petkopoulou with the support of the Greek Ministry of Culture and the Niarchos Foundation.