Word Count: 520 | Reading Time: 2 min
I found myself revisiting Vandana Singh’s Speculative Manifesto recently. It is a marvellous document, not least because it reminds us that we have always told stories rooted in the imagination. It also points out that speculative fiction is a way-maker; showing us what once was – even half-remembered – what could be, and what has always been.
This is a particularly distressing time in history. Waves of authoritarianism are sweeping the world. A genocide is being live-streamed, and the mainstream media is attempting to make the unbearable palatable. We need way-making more than ever. We need to find ways of being in community with each other. As discourse gets more and more polarised, we need our stories, in all of their multiplicity, messiness, and mirrorings.
I loved reading the stories submitted for consideration for this issue. So many stories spoke to each other in theme, concern, or the myth they wanted to re-tell. You’ll find when you read the entire issue how the four stories presented here interlock, magnify and amplify each other.
This is one of the joys of re-telling stories from a shared cultural history.
All of these stories describe encounters with the more-than-human.
In Momina Sohail’s The Sulaiman, myths from multiple cultures collide with a daughter’s grief and coalesce in the body of a mountain that will long outlast humanity. The encounter between the young woman and the old place is a reminder of the uncanny power of landscape, the things people think they know about it, and how often they are proved wrong.
In Nishka Dasgupta’s Deep in a Lightless Forest, a man looks for his beloved sister. The setting is made magical through the presence of the demons that have populated desi folklore; the writer playfully upturns assumptions about them. Dasgupta reminds us that each telling is also its own provocation against received wisdom about tropes and stock characters. There is a warming reminder of the ways in which friends are made, and family is found.
In Ramsha Farooq Raja’s Late Night Conversations, two generations of sisters in the same family grapple with the supernatural; a haunting, or possession, is minutely examined, and stitched together with the horror that engulfs the mundane world. The heart of the story is relational complexity, the ways in which violence and love co-exist.
Finally, in veteran writer Indrapramit Das’ You Will Survive This Night, which I am delighted to be able to reprint here, a seemingly mundane event escalates first into a violence we know all too well, and then into a blazing denouement full of supernatural power. In the centre of it is a character familiar to us from Tantric and Buddhist folklore, engaged with using great care and skill, shaped into a figure who is both vulnerable and powerful.
We also have Ayesha Channa’s Dimensional Diaries, doing the important work of documenting South Asian speculative fiction; I’m very much looking forward to reading it.
I feel privileged to have been able to guest-edit this issue, and I hope you enjoy the stories as much as I did.
Shreya Ila Anasuya
September 2025