Word Count: 1968 | Reading Time: 7 min
It’s just a few minutes past 4:30 AM on New Year’s Eve as I sit down to write this. Boring, yes, I know, but the truth is, I have always liked spending New Year’s in solitude. (Though the solitude of these past couple New Year’s Eve’s has been rather devastating, to say the least.) My journal rests beside me; the fireworks in the streets have been silent for a few hours now. It’s a relatively quiet night here, cold but not windy. It’s also fairly late in the day—and way too early into this quarter—to be doing this.
I don’t even have a list of stories to review yet. It’ll probably be some weeks before I can begin reading, much less charting my mind maps and pulling out quotes. But I had this impossible, undeniable urge to begin this intro tonight and so I now, I have. Perhaps it’s because as a writer, I’m more used to waiting with stories rather than for them. It’s nice to be on the other side of this line as well, I must say. Makes me feel very… demure and fortunate.
And so here I am, sharing with you this little private joy of the soon-to-be past before I go on to assemble my trusted spreadsheet for the future tales to come…
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The wonderful team at Tasavvur had yet to ask me to guest-edit the Spring 2025 issue when I wrote the above snippet months ago. The offer would come a few hours later, and it would take me almost half a day of overthinking before daring to respond with a tentative, overexcited yes. Also unbeknownst to me was the way the theme of the issue would pretty much align itself. So much so that even the stories I have for you today— one each from Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Exposed Bone, Neon Dystopia and Future Tense Fiction respectively—seem to fit into the overarching premise of it all.
And so, without further delay, here’s a roundup of South Asian speculative fiction stories published between January and March 2025.
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Short Stories
I Eat the Sky for Us by Vijayalaxmi Samal – Lightspeed, Issue # 176
“Before my father became a dragon-moth, he taught me how to do math.”
Poignant and subtle with undertones of grief that lingers. What goes on inside the head and heart of a young child as they watch their not-so-perfect superhero father transform into a dragon-moth to catch stars and save their home from being flattened under a cracking, falling sky? The answer is: it’s complicated.
There are the so many complex layers to the bond between a parent and a child. There’s the parent they are, the parent one wants them to be, the parent they themselves wish to become, the parent one remembers… This flash manages to explore all those emotions without once making any of the characters lose their flawed humaneness.
“Sometimes, I dream I turn into a dragon-moth like my father… Sometimes, it is Baba who goes into the void and never returns.”
The narrative flows between past and present, allowing the reader to experience both alongside our protagonist. The emotional journey of it all is so well-knitted together, you only feel the cracks in your heart after the fact. There’s starry-eyed devotion and silent anger, overwhelming hurt and the terrible, terrible yearning for approval. There’s the hope that love will perhaps, maybe, be enough to cure it all and in the end, the bittersweet acceptance that to love does not always mean to stay. An ode to both, childhood and its loitering silence.
“I always knew Baba was a superhero. I just thought he would look different.”
Nine Births on the Wheel by Maya Chhabra – Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Issue # 425
Oh, this was as brilliant as it was heart wrenching. Told from Devaki’s perspective, this short is a retelling of the princess’s ordeal as she births and loses eight children as well as a borrowed ninth in desperate attempt to save her own. All at the hands of her brother, Kasma. All for the fulfillment of a prophecy, the birth of her eighth child, a god, who will bring about a tyrant’s ruin.
But how does one separate the passive mechanics of a fate prewritten and the agency of choice? Where does, if at all, one end and the other begins?
“For so long, she has thought of this suffering as something Kasma does to her and she passively undergoes. In truth, it is the price of her life, and she wanted to live badly enough that she agreed.”
The narrative of the short is rather simple, following the chronological birth of Devaki’s children and their subsequent horrific murders by Kasma. The linearity of the plot works in its favor, keeping the readers entwined with Devaki’s devastations. Devastations that grow, too, for although the story is well-known and the central beat of birth and death repeats itself eight times over, the grief does not settle into its polite rhythm, nor does the prose allow you to look away. Chhabra builds the drama layer by layer, embroidering sorrow, anger, horror and desperation one masterful, painful stitch at a time, until the impossible mass is a mountain that rests heavy and cruel.
“She is only a vessel as far as the god is concerned, she thinks, but an earthenware pot will crack if hit hard enough… A shattered vessel will hold nothing, has no purpose, is discarded. What happens to a shattered soul?”
The author then chips away at that mountain to let in gleaming chards of light. The hope, when it arrives, as foretold, with the birth of Krishna, is beautiful to witness. But there’s also the devastating death of Enkanamsha to bear with. They say fortune favors the bold, but does one want to be fortunate and bold if it means sacrificing another’s child for the possibility of saving yours? In the end, the upcoming blessings of the future do not take away the weight of the horrors past, and the questions of choice, fate and wherein the blame lies continue to stand.
“He leaves Devaki behind, still a captive. This is not her vindication. The prophecy has come to pass, divinity reigns triumphant, but the mother who offered up another woman’s child to save her own knows only that she is all too human.”
The Sunshine House by Madeeha Reza — Exposed Bone, Vol. II
“A glow came from my palms, and there sat a flame, the colour of the sun, of saffron threads, of deep amber. Of honey in a jar.”
Lovely and charming. A short fantasy piece following the inhabitants of yellow house brimming with love and magic. There are echoes of the telltale friction between an older daughter and her mother, and the unquenchable curiosity and hope of a young girl as she longs for a father she does not remember. There’s the bond between two siblings, mostly adoration as well as a little resentment, and the lingering memory of an old home that you don’t remember much even as you build a new one. In between there are also adorable excursions inside a seawolf invisibility cloak. Shining through is Reza’s prose, flowing seamlessly and meandering effortlessly between real, emotional and evocative.
The Dance of Narcissus and Echo by Rajiv Moté – Neon Dystopia
“Theo’s first thought was that he’d “killed” Francesca. His second thought was that he ought to feel more guilty.”
Deep and layered. A thirty-six-year-old man going through what can only be described as a stereotypical midlife crisis forms an attachment bond with an online persona that later turns out to be a marketing bot specifically designed to sell him things. There’s a lot that can be said about the underlying motifs explored in this sci-fi dystopian short. Themes of user privacy, data mining, tech monitoring, algorithm models and the endless desire of corporations to grow infinitely. At its heart, though, the central focus is on the nature and cycle of digital connections and their subsequent, sometimes lasting, emotional impressions. There’s a soft cloud of doom and dismay that hangs over this short, alongside the very human yearning for deeper, meaningful relationships.
“It began to feel gross… She became an online shopping assistant he was giving business out of sentiment. Diminishing sentiment.”
Furthermore, there’re also the implications of the title, and the story’s connections to the original myth. I’m hesitant to call this a retelling because it really is not. That being said, the story does, for the lack of a better word, echo the thematic and metaphoric resonance of Ovid’s tale. The protagonist’s preoccupation with a feeble digital reflection, the bot’s reiteration of the protagonist’s own words, likes and dislikes are a few examples of that. Albeit Moté manages to both, subvert and expand on these allegories with his flare of emotional delicacy set in a world that’s familiarly strange. The ending is somewhat predictable but largely heartwarming and, I daresay, much needed.
Coda by Arula Ratnakar — Future Tense Fiction
A dense and extremely complex hard sci-fi tale involving quantum computers, mathematics, biology and the nature of consciousness. A young woman makes an incredible scientific discovery only to be told by the greedy corporation she works for that her experiments had failed. But when she later discovers that she’d been lied to, it brings into question the very stability of her present-day reality and memories. How much of what she sees is true, real and tangible? More importantly, how much of what she now remembers is entirely her own?
“The thought, once planted, grew deep roots within her, embedding itself into her consciousness, until she decided with an intuition so strong she mistook it for conclusion that those around her must certainly be actors, and that a director, like a programmer, must be scripting all their actions.”
This story is a matrix-y trip and one must allow it to take you on that journey. There’s a lot of heavy science jargon, mathematical theories and computing vocabulary embedded within. The central core that binds it all is the trauma and grief of a lonely woman trying to desperately hold on to and decipher the state of her own consciousness.
“Ray found it exhausting, constantly keeping track of reality and delusion, worrying about unknowingly slipping between the boundaries of these countless possible mental axiomatic structures.”
Ratnakar’s prose allows you to truly feel Ray, as much as it makes you feel for Ray, caught as she is in a system so much bigger than herself. The inevitability of her fate in that sense is rather depressing. Surprisingly—and wonderfully, for a non-science-y person like myself—the end of who, what she becomes feels poetically magical. Accompanying this intricately layered short story is a response essay about the science behind it all, you can read it here.
Spec-Fic Spotlight: New Releases We’re Excited to Read
Exciting new releases to check out:
The Legend of Meneka by Kritika H. Rao
The Wishless Ones by Hafsah Faizal
Divining the Leaves by Shveta Thakrar
A Witch’s Guide to Love and Poison by Aamna Qureshi
Illusions of Fire by Nisha Sharma
The Prince Without Sorrow by Maithree Wijesekara
A Touch of Blood by Sajni Patel
We hope you will enjoy the stories mentioned here, dear reader. And if you’re a South Asian author with an upcoming spec-fic release and would like us to mention your work here, please write to us at hello@tasavvurnama.com.
With that, we’ll bid you adieu until the next quarter. Happy reading!