The most exciting Indian speculative fiction today is looking inward.
Through stories of oppressed sentient robots, rebellious teens, nuclear wipeouts, a dystopia where people breathe canned air, vampires and absurd algorithms, they seem to probe the future and the present, asking: Who gets to imagine and belong in the future? And: What happens when the future inherits today’s inequalities?
“South Asian speculative fiction (SF), and Indian speculative fiction, negotiate not just emergent science, mutating societies, evolving stories, but also, quite
The most exciting Indian speculative fiction today is looking inward.
Through stories of oppressed sentient robots, rebellious teens, nuclear wipeouts, a dystopia where people breathe canned air, vampires and absurd algorithms, they seem to probe the future and the present, asking: Who gets to imagine and belong in the future? And: What happens when the future inherits today’s inequalities?
“South Asian speculative fiction (SF), and Indian speculative fiction, negotiate not just emergent science, mutating societies, evolving stories, but also, quite paradoxically, sedimented mythologies. Think of the film, Kalki 2898 AD (2024). I think Indian SF is doing a great job of telling stories from different perspectives, and vantage points, though there’s always scope to grow,” says Sami Ahmad Khan, assistant professor of science fiction studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.
Check out these two Indian anthologies, recommended by Khan, that bring together stories where caste, class, institutional violence, capitalism, technology and ecological anxiety collide.
THE OTHER HALF
Rebellious teens steal time from their parents. A tourist vampire has a lust for Indian blood. A merchant sells recorded pain, trapped in glass bangles.
Manjula Padmanabhan’s Stolen Hours and Other Curiosities (2025) weaves together 25 stories of characters that fuse the uncanny and the humane with horror, dark fantasy and satire, to examine the absurdities and anxieties of contemporary life.
In Stolen Hours, we meet a mean-streaked 15-year-old tech genius, Cyril Aloysius de Cruz, who delights in breaking down discarded old devices to invent machines of his own. One of these inventions is an egg-like contraption that, it turns out, can steal another person’s time. How much will he take?
In The Pain Merchant, the author imagines a world where pain has disappeared. It can be found only at the pain merchant, who stores ancient experiences of it and sells them. One can request menstrual cramps, the sharp cuts of broken glass, the ache of an old bullet wound.
A Cline’s View introduces readers to special investigator Sh’ana, a clone made using feline genes. She has a long tail, a furry face, and can sniff out emotions: the acrid scent of embarrassment, the stinging stench of anguish, the smell of someone withholding information.
This world of odd, speculative futures and characters has been her way of reckoning with the feeling of being othered, as a young person growing up around the world, in Sweden, Pakistan and Thailand, before returning to India.
“I was often ‘the foreigner’ in the schools I went to as a child, and I enjoyed my role as ‘visiting alien’. It was no different when we returned to India. I have liked being a ‘forever tourist’. My speculative-fiction writing is a kind of travelogue, in that sense,” she says.
VOICES FROM THE MARGINS
What might science-fiction look like if it were told from the perspective of those history has pushed to the margins?
The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF is a response to that question, reimagining the past and future through the lenses of caste, resistance and social justice.
Neerav Patel’s Robot S/C 5 (translated from the Gujarati by Gopika Jadeja), for instance, imagines a future in which robot servants are engaged as help in the mansion of a scientist couple. The robots appear to have been named for their human predecessors — named S/C 5, S/T 9, OBC 103, SEBC 68 — and are treated as they were. But how will they respond?
Sanatan Gaming by Kunal Lokhande, meanwhile, unfolds as a comic book-style narrative. Combining visuals of a gaming screen with text, it tells the story of an anonymous channel called Sanatan Gaming that lets gamers build a temple in a remote village, send Vedic spaceships to unknown galaxies, shoot asuras to protect dharma.
Through users and critics like Mr Sharma, Mr Patwardhan and Mr Chatterjee, who love, troll and critique the channel, the story traces the rise of bigotry, hate and jingoism behind blue screens.
The anthology, edited by RT Samuel, Rakesh K and Rashmi RD, brings together Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi and other marginalised voices from South Asia and the diaspora, including writers such as Bama, Mimi Mondal, Gogu Shyamala, Tamilmagan, Archita Mittra and Subash Thebe Limbu.
With stories ranging from ghosts and AI to cyberpunk futures and magical heirlooms, the collection merges past and future to confront a present that simply doesn’t change as it ought to.
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