Dorado Raganos History

Dorado Raganos (The Witches of Dorado) is a science fiction and fantasy fanzine published since 1994 by several women in the Vilnius science fiction club Dorado in Vilnius, Lithuania. Back then, only few science fiction or fantasy books were published in Lithuania (and hardly any by Lithuanian authors), there were no magazines dedicated to these genres, and opportunities for publishing SF/F in mainstream magazines were very limited, too. It's sad but not surprising, given the economics of book publishing. There are no more than 3 million people in the whole world who can read Lithuanian. Compare that with hundreds of millions of people who read English! Even so, only a small part of English language SF/F literature brings profit to publishers. Consider how much harder that would be in Lithuania, where the reader base is a couple orders of magnitude smaller.

All of this made it very hard for young, aspiring SF/F writers to get published, and we decided to fill this need, to provide a way for beginner authors to reach an audience, to encourage them to pull their creations out of the recesses of dusty drawers and expose them to daylight. As Audrone, the founder of the fanzine and one of its editors, says, writing for your closest friends soon gets boring. Opening up one's works to the wider readership, on the other hand, helps the writer grow. It was, and still is, our fondest dream: to help Lithuanian science fiction and fantasy grow by providing new authors with readership and constructive criticism. Indeed, some of the beginners we published in the past went on to contribute to Lithuanian SF/F anthologies such as Sviecianti strele (The Shining Arrow), 1996 and Geriausia Lietuvos fantastika (The Best of Lithuanian SF and Fantasy) 1997 - 2002. That's not to say we only publish beginners: we are very happy to host established authors in our pages.

You may wonder, why Witches? It has nothing to do with witchcraft, or Wicca, or some such -- we don't have a special interest in it; nor does it mean that our fanzine is biased towards the fantasy genre -- it is not! Rather, the reasons are historical, and they have to do with the circumstances surrounding the birth of our fanzine. As with many things in life, our fanzine came into existence because of two different kinds of reasons. The first kind were the long-term, fundamental reasons mentioned above: a need for aspiring SF/F writers to find a publishing venue. The second kind was a temporary set of circumstances that prompted us into action.

There was a time in Dorado SF club when the women of the club felt kind of isolated by the gaming trend that was taking over fandom. In the early nineties roleplaying games were still a novelty in Lithuania, and Dorado'ans could not get enough of them. As club meetings evolved (or, rather, devolved) into clamorous discussions on Psi and Phi powers and charisma points and so on, some of us girls yearned for more creative pursuits, the kind that would let us enjoy much more of what SF/F has to give, than just the minutiae of games.

This led to the Great Coup within Dorado. One evening Audrone invited the girls of the club over to the corner of the room, where, after wrangling a table away from the gamers, they sat down and read the stories they had written. This continued for several meetings, the stories multiplied, and this activity culminated in an idea of starting a fanzine. At one of those meetings one of the older club members wandered in after a long absence, and, seeing Dorado divided into two "camps" of rather unequal size, asked us: "Are those dragonists (i.e. Dungeons and Dragons players) giving you a hard time?" Audrone's answer slipped out spontaneously: "What kind of witches would we be if we could not stand up to them?!" And so the name The Witches of Dorado was born.

So the Dorado Raganos magazine began, then published by three women, and still is: Diana Lenceviciene (formerly Butkiene), Elze Hamilton (formerly Surgailyte) and Audrone Vodzinskaite-Städje, none of whom are still living in Lithuania. Elze is living in Austin, TX, Diana in Boston, MA, in the US, and Audrone in Stockholm, Sweden.

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