The IF Anthology of New Indian SFF: Speculative fiction rooted, yet free
A new anthology of Indian speculative fiction showcases the breadth of the genre as it is practised today
In his preface to the The IF Anthology of New Indian SFF, the first volume of a planned series of speculative fiction anthologies by Westland Books, editor Gautam Bhatia admits that while the process of putting this collection together was made as bias-free as possible with an open call for submissions and double-blind readings, his own leaning towards what he calls the “science fiction end of the SFFH (Science-fiction, Fantasy and Horror) spectrum" may have influenced the selection of stories.
Despite these protestations, the 11 stories in this volume are very different from one another, and most cannot be slotted neatly into any of the SFFH boxes, which is why, as Bhatia says, speculative fiction is a spectrum. Goodreads and the global SFF community might be a bit unhealthily obsessed with labelling—this is Climate Fiction, that is Hopepunk, something else is New Space Opera—but clearly, our homegrown speculative fiction writers are not interested in slotting themselves into these (mainly marketing-led) groupings.
The anthology begins with a story that, in my view, not only illustrates this clearly but is among the strongest of the selection. The Last Projectionist by Ajay Patri is a chilling—bordering on horror—story about an imagined practice involving people who could literally project their imaginings on to a screen. Unfolding in the form of disconnected voices giving their opinion on a proposed documentary film about the last known human to practise this skill, it invites the reader to piece the story together—an unflinching account of exploitation and retro-fitting the past into convenient narratives.
Like the protagonist of Heartland by Anushree Nande, who can move among other people’s memories in search of her own origin story, speculative fiction too travels between the past, the present and the future. In Muniyamma by Prashanth Srivatsa, a woman—who is no longer quite flesh-and-blood human being, perhaps—remembers her past as she helps birth the future in a new world.
Climate anxiety suffuses the book—in Tomorrow’s Ancestors, a descendant of a poet who survived the 2015 Chennai floods travels through time, pulled into the past through writing, even as she allows her ancestors to dream of a better future than the one of hard labour they currently lead.
In Priyamvadha Shivaji’s lyrical, abstract story Sudden Showers, the sea disappears even as a community of women seemingly alienated from the rest of the world strive to return home—it contained echoes, for me, of Anton Hur’s Towards Eternity, a deeply philosophical epic saga spanning centuries in which a group of women soldiers search for their humanity.
It is inevitable that in an age of rapidly proliferating AI, questions about what it means to be human—is it biology, or something more ineffable?—would show up in a collection like this. They do so, in uniquely Indian ways. In Shobhita Narayan’s Of Holo Maa, a woman in a post-apocalyptic far future carefully preserves her kanjeevaram and kalamkari saris, and is herself given a second life through technology we do not yet possess.
Some of these stories are intimate tales of rebellion and connection, while others are more epic and sweeping in scope. Most are, of necessity, bleak—we are not living through one of contemporary history’s more hopeful eras and this is inevitably reflected in the stories these writers have chosen to tell. Dystopian futures and alternate universes have always fascinated SFF writers, even more so in the 21st century, when they have reached peak popularity.
We probably love fictional dystopias because they help us downplay, for a short while, the ones we are actually living through—at least we are not at the stage where we are sending our children to participate in killing games for entertainment, not yet, we tell ourselves. In this collection, Dilli Circa 50 NE by Shubham Mamgain imagines a near-future national Capital that is only a few steps ahead of the real-world city in being a place of constant danger, discomfort and censorship. It is a deeply political story, more effective for being written in a light, half-amused tone.
Westland’s ‘IF’ imprint, of which this is the first title, is an attempt to bring together Indian speculative fiction writing. Going by the promise of this volume, it will be an exciting space to watch for new talent in the genre.
Together, the 11 stories in this collection display the depth and breadth—in terms of subject, tone and style—that speculative fiction writing in India has achieved. It has come a long way from the early SF of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream and Rahul Sankrityayan’s Baeesveen Sadi, but is close to them at the same time, remaining rooted and yet free.
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