Interview - Sci Fi Ireland

28 APRIL 2026

The Belfast Review interviews the editor of Belfast's newest magazine Sci Fi Ireland to find out the craic, the origin story, and the details of their first issue's launch in May.

INTERVIEW: MARK MULLAN OF SCI FI IRELAND

HANNA NIELSON

THE BELFAST REVIEW

TBR: Tell us the origin story of Sci Fi Ireland.

MM: The origin story of SFI is probably two-part. So I was having a conversation with RB Kelly at the Belfast Book Festival last year. And there’d been a day all about ways to get published. And RB Kelly was talking about sci fi publishing on a panel. And I remember speaking to her at the break. I was trying to find places myself to get published and just asked her like, ‘Where do you get published? What’s the magazines in Ireland? Where are they, who are they, where do you find them?’

She mentioned that we had one, which is Phantasmagoria, which is a class magazine, but they lean very strongly towards horror. I’ve met up with Trevor the editor [at Phantasmagoria] a couple times, and he’s cool as all fuck but he’s not that into sci fi. Aside from that, there was nowhere else to go.

And then not long before that I’d been to Eastercon, and just seen the sheer amount of craic. Like people just doing it for themselves. All the indie publishing. And seeing like a thousand people all come together and be genuinely enthusiastic. Though, when I was at Eastercon I would never have thought about doing it myself. I was just enjoying it, and it was a genuinely good time. Like people having genuinely very serious conversations about Star Wars, like passionate about the nature of Anakin Skywalker, good and evil – just like, people who care like fuck about things. It was really, really nice.

So that was the seed. The conversation with RB Kelly at Belfast Book Festival, was the thing that germinated the seed, and the excitement still running on from Eastercon.

It was probably only about four to six weeks later that I first got in contact with you [re mentoring]. And then the rest is history, but the origin. Having that realisation that we needed more, that we deserve more in the Irish sci fi scene.

TBR: What do you hope to bring to readers that’s new and different?

MM: Oh… New and different is a tough question for science fiction. I guess science fiction that’s truly up to the minute, because I know there’s sci fi magazines where you can’t submit because they’re over-subscribed. It means they’re putting in old stories or things like that. You know, we’re at this point [internet glitch]. The internet doesn’t seem to like it when I speak.

TBR: It seems to cut out just when you’re ready to launch into a good answer.

MM: It thinks I’ve got too much to say. Thinks I’m getting notions of myself.

TBR: But that’s a good point. The more established sci fi magazines being over-subscribed, and they’re not printing the new stories, they’re printing the old.

MM: I suppose whether we’re trying to bring anything new or not is an important question. Maybe we’re trying to bring back something Ireland has had in the past and should always have, which is just a vibrant speculative fiction scene.

There’s a wee bit of a bias [in the literary scene], especially away from science fiction. For some reason we don’t see ourselves as that kind of storyeteller. And yet we have had spaces that that before. Like there’s been Extros, and FTL, and Albedo-1. And they were phenomenal in their time. It’s not like those magazines kind of collapsed or ceased to fuction – people run out of steam. L-Beto ran for fifty issues, like eventually you can’t maintain that and that’s okay.

But something the Irish sci fi scene deserves is a continuous existence of the scene, where people can read up-to-date sci fi from people who are writing to the moment, in the real world. Rather than writing to publication, or who are maybe years behind by the time you get a novel through to an agent, and all this like. 

So it’s having that, where people can write a story in the summer and submit it to us in the winter, and it’s in the May issue. I think that’s the thing that’s truly important and truly relevant. That the stories are fresh and new.

And technology is moving so quickly. Science fiction has to move as fast if it’s going to continue to do the thing that it’s mean to do – which is, in my opinion, to inform how we interact with the technology of our day as it arises. And to do that, sci fi has to be coming at you hot. It can’t be five to ten years out of date.

TBR: What have you discovered about stepping into the role of Editor in Chief? Any surprises or did you feel prepared?

MM: I’ve discovered that there’s a great truth in the adage that any creative project has to be a creative collaboration. With support and with creative resistance. The magazine simply would not exist if it had not been for my mentor Hanna [Nielson] – I’m going to speak in the third person, as if it’s not you.

TBR: [laughs]

MM: Without Hanna’s mentoring [through The Belfast Review’s Journal Publishing masterclass] the magazine Sci Fi Ireland would not exist. It would have been too much of an undertaking initially, just to set out and do it from scratch. Like, you have to stand on the shoulders of the greats who’ve gone before you in that.

I leanred you need people to correct for your biases. We’re got a readership of four and then Alex Johnston is the other lead editor. I’ve now got the final 8 stories for the first issue, and I could almost see how I would have picked if it hadn’t been for the team – and it would have been wrong. It would have been too full of my biases, too full of me, and it’s not meant to be that.

The magazine isn’t meant to be a representation of how I feel, or what I think. It’s meant to represent the unified readers’ and writers’ consciousness of Ireland, and the sci fi community of Ireland. It can’t be that if it’s one person’s bias. You need the creative resistance, you need creative friction, and you need support, otherwise the whole thing will just kind of flop.

Thankfully I was able to learn that lesson without actually doing it. I was able to learn it from you [during the masterclass]. I started with those assumptions, and then went, ‘Ah yeah, you do need people to give support and to argue with you. And to tell you once in a while everything’s going to be okay.’ Those are important things. That’s my biggest lesson.

TBR: Give us the plug – the launch dates, the particulars about when the magazine is coming out and where to get it.

MM: Sci Fi Ireland Issue 1 is launching at Norncon, which is the newly minted Northern Irish Science Fiction Convention, taking place on the 9th of May. And we’re on at 5.30 PM. We’re headlining. We’re closing the day down and leading into the evening party. We’ll have a selection of our authors come and read, and I’ll be up there at the front making some noise. And then hopefully it’s gonna turn into a great party afterwards. There will be physical copies of the magazine available on the day, to get them signed. Also from then on we’ll have digital copies available on our website.

TBR: What can readers expect from the first issue?

MM: From the first issue they can expect a lovely balance of science fiction that is trying to be prescient and relevant, and stories that will entertain but where entertainment is not their exclusive purpose.

Like we are also looking to kind of hit that cusp of that Arthur C Clarke quote about magic and science, and how they can appear the same. I also think then there is a bit of magic in storytelling, where science fact comes so hot on the heels of science fiction.

When you’re writing the right thing, telling the right stories, you’re informing the technology of the next five to twenty years, and how people think about that. That’s one of the things you can expect from Sci Fi Ireland, things that are on the nose, things that are of the moment.

But also we do have a bias at the magazine, it just may be a bias of mine, maybe it’s a bias of the Irish people. There’s a bias towards a bit of optimism, that’s got to be said. We want things realistic, we want things close to home, but with the attitude that humans are good and can be better.

TBR: Just so readers have context, how would you describe the nuts and bolts of how you operate and how you’re funded?

We’re funded by me, hopefully for not too much longer. We will be putting ourselves in for funding with the Irish Arts Council this summer. And I’m quietly optimistic that we deserve it and that we’re a good project. We’re a fascilitating space for emerging writers, and creating something that Ireland deserves – dare I say, needs.

But for the moment I fund it by working as a chiropractor, helping people’s backs and necks. And then every time I get paid, I put a certain amount of money into a separate bank account that I then use to print magazines, and pay authors, and pay artists.

We have open submissions twice a year, in June and July, and again in December and January. Then we read like absolute lunatics, for a month, and we whittle the whole – I’m struggling with the word slush pile. I’m using it more and more these days, and I think it’s a bit mean. But we have a slush pile that becomes a long list, and a long list becomes a short list, and a short list becomes eight stories – in kind of successive waves of reading and then feeding back to each other. Asking, each other, ‘What does the story give you at a second read?’

You can see themes emerging, certainly once you get to a short list. You can see, ‘Right, there are these three or four things that are on the minds of the writers at this point.’ And giving that’s who we’re representing, we hone in on those things.

I don’t know if we’ll ever really do specific themes. Themes risk my biases sneaking into the magazine, and me going, ‘Well, I wanna see everybody talking about robots.’ Whereas if themes emerge naturally, then I’m very happy to go with that.

The nuts and bolts is then we put it together, format it, justify it, proofread it. Get some art on it. The artistic process is good actually. For this issue I’ve worked with two artists to get two pieces of cover art. I’ve decided the magazine’s just going to have two front covers, and that’s how it’s gonna be.

We’re trying to look at artistic concepts that overlap with Irish myth, Irish symbolism, Irish legend, Irish storytelling – and then like presient technologies, technologies that are either relevant right now or that are coming into relevance. And yeah, by the end of all that, there’s a magazine.

TBR: Who do you accept submissions from? Any restrictions you’d like to mention?

MM: Yes, we accept submissions from writers who are either living on, or who are born on the island of Ireland. For our commissions I’ve actually left myself a little back door, because I am aware that ‘Sci Fi Ireland’ is a space for emerging Irish writers but then I’m also very aware that there are people all over the world who are Irish in other ways. But my hope is to create some kind of secondary [more inclusive] stream through the commissions. I’ve just left myself that loophole that I can do what I want there. So it might be that we commission stories from writers who are Irish in other ways, or are in other ways connected to the island.

TBR: What does it mean to you personally to be able to set up and run Sci Fi Ireland?

MM: To me it means a wonderful opportunity to grow the scene. And what I mean by that is something my mum and I speak about a lot actually. Like, if there’s no scene, make a scene.

My mother’s always been accused of being a difficult woman, of ‘making scenes’. When in reality there’s just a real like patriarchial exclusion of women in certain spaces. So when my mum ran up against these things, she would go, ‘Fuck you, I’ll make my own scene,’ and would then be accused of being difficult and ‘making a scene’.

It’s almost like an unofficial motto, or unofficial mantra. Like if there’s no scene, just make a scene. And if people get pissed off just don’t worry about it.

Now there obviously is a sci fi scene in Ireland, but it’s not what it should be. So, for me personally to kind of put my stone in the church of Irish sci fi does give me a great deal of pride, and it is a great pleasure. Like it is just fun, as well.

And then there’s a bit of ego – like everybody else, I also want to be published.

In editing, I’ve learned more about writing in what, four months of reading and editing than I maybe learned in my entire Master’s degree [in Creative Writing]. Dunno if that’s too harsh?

TBR: No, it is true. I can confirm that from experience.

MM: The Master’s was good, but three to four months reading and editing, under pressure, and up to the standard that’s expected to be professional – I’m like, fuck, that’s some powerful shit.

And my most recent short story that I’ve written is incomparable to everything that I’ve written before. Like the standard’s gone through the roof. So it means that as well. And I have enough pride and enough ego to be like, ‘Yeah, it’s good for me,’ and I am happy about that.

TBR: Is there anything else you wanted add that I haven’t covered?

MM: I don’t think so. Because if you ask me one more question, I’ll answer several others. I will just keep talking, like.

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