I have said and written plenty about my interest in speculative fiction, aka fantastika, aka science fiction and fantasy (SFF). I continue to be most interested in horror in all its manifestations as the engine of my musings. The peculiarities of horror as a genre — vocabulary, atmospherics, relational rupture, cognitive dissonance — allow me to tell my stories in the most effective way I can. They make me a braver writer.
But this is not an article on the value of SFF or horror to South Asian literature. Such fiction has existed in South Asia for millenia under pre-colonial non-Anglophone names. Plenty of South Asian writers and academics have done a lot of work on the subject with little need left to whip that particular dead horse. With the establishment of The Salam Award for Imaginative Fiction and the wonderful group of young writers that have come up through it and coalesced around it, as well as the many who found their own way onto the global SFF scene — this includes visual artists — I believe modern Pakistani SFF/H is finally coming of age.
Instead, I’d like to talk about the opening and shutting of doors.
I’ve been attracted to ‘wonder tales’ since I was five or six. I believe my mother started me off, reading aloud from tall, thin colorful storybooks featuring tall, thin, white princes; short, beautiful, button-nosed princesses; scary, wart-nosed witches; and magical creatures exhaling fire. Mama would stop halfway through the book, forcing me to read further on my own. She would hide these fairy tales under sofa cushions for me to find and devour.
Treasure hunts for magical objects. What else could I have turned into but a writer of such tales?
Mama opened a door that stood open, inviting, for most of my life — sometimes in the center, mostly at the periphery of my vision. It is a doorway I didn’t properly walk through till I was in my thirties. Could I have come in earlier had opportunity and precedent existed? Hindsight is 20-20 and wishes are not horses, but could I have? The world of letters is filled with precocious men and women, and history tells us many wrote their best work before they turned twenty-five. (Many didn’t. Looking at your boy Tolstoy).
It does make one wonder, though. Also makes one the slightest bit sad.
I went to med school when I was eighteen. That is what you did in Pakistan in the 90s: you became an engineer or a doctor, the fork of choice neatly bisecting your life somewhere around age 15. You committed, you entered, and you shut the door firmly behind you. I never had a chance at anything else. Not till I was thirty, anyway.
Which brings us back to the opening of such doors, especially in Pakistan, which was, for the longest time, a marginalized country.
This new era of pandemics, covert wars, climate apocalypse, and feral capitalist carnage may be terrifying but it’s also hopeful. Where mobs have mindlessly surged, saner heads have also stood ground and prevailed. We see activists, writers, thinkers, scientists, and philanthropists within and without South Asia come together to create new opportunities for progress and sustainable development in every field.
In Pakistan, there is the 2047 Fellowship, designed by some of the most accomplished folk in the country to nurture thought leaders. The LUMS incubation center, the science fiction courses at Habib and IBA, as well as the burgeoning writer-led indie publishing houses coming together in support of an industry that was near collapse are all promising initiatives.
The world of SF is not much different. Clarion West and Clarion are now offering inexpensive online classes (with scholarships), broadening access of marginalized writers and artists to these powerhouses of spec-fic education. Where once horror was treated as a bastard step-sibling of science fiction, more SF writers are writing horror and weird fiction, utilizing tools from both worlds and genres to electrify their stories. Both the Horror Writers Association (HWA) and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of American (SFWA) have made commitments to fight inequity in publishing, are frequently reaching out to non-white and non-Anglo creators. Once, brown, Asian, and/or Muslim writers in SF and horror were exotic. Now they’re the norm.
Doors swinging open left and right.
As a result, exciting and interesting new fiction and nonfiction can be found in the pages of major SF magazines, including the (once) Big Three: Asimov’s, Analog, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (F&SF). When my collection Midnight Doorways: Fables from Pakistan was reviewed in F&SF, it was a defining moment for Pakistani millennials who grew up reading Vonnegut, Shirley Jackson, Harlan Ellison, and Ray Bradbury. F&SF serialized Stephen King’s The Gunslinger for fuck’s sake! And now they were reviewing my book?
If it’s true that, for better or worse, the devil does not open closed doors (as the hadith goes), then it must fall upon God or (wo)man to do so. Blast them open with dynamite if needed. And that is what folks like Salik Shah (Mithila Review) and Tehseen Baweja (Salam Award and now Tasavvur) are doing. They’re making history and blazing trails where none existed.
Dear reader, may their — and subsequently your — journey be interesting, the sights glorious, and the destination rewarding.