Speculative fiction rooted in India, yet free

Anew anthology of Indian speculative fiction showcases the breadth of the genre as it is practised today

- Shrabonti Bagchi

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 tories.

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 isa spectrum. Good-reads 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.