Word Count: 572 | Reading Time: 2 min
What makes speculative fiction different from literary fiction? I came to Tasavvur as someone whose job it is to study “the canon” of literature in English. As I have read across genres, however, it has become less clear what the distinction between so-called canonical and peripheral forms of writing really is; in a seminar on genre fiction a few years ago, for example, my professor offered the possibility that the only difference might be in the packaging. We are primed to receive great thoughts if the book has already established that the book is “a modern classic”––we are less certain when we encounter new wild-colored jackets with even wilder fonts. Perception matters.
And yet perception is exactly what speculative fiction offers us. The perspectival shift is essential to reframing the ordinary, or more accurately, what appears to be ordinary. SF offers a defamiliarizing look at everyday lives, often with elements that draw our attention because they have never been imagined before. Shifted perspectives find many forms in Issue 003 of Tasavvur. Hamza Sarfraz’s story “Being A Putla” offers us a peek into a futuristic Lahore where living in cybernetic bodies is becoming the norm for people with disabilities—but deftly, it also asks us to consider how it feels to be so visibly Other. Archita Mittra writes of loves claimed and lost amid ecological crisis in “The Green Man’s Wife,” and the vinelike tendrils of emotion that keep the two lovers entangled retained their grip on me for a long time after I read it. Murtaza Mohsin’s “Thus Gone” takes on time-traveling vengeance with gusto—it’ll sweep you along! You’ll get the sense that you never really know what the other is thinking when you read “Street Rat” by Abhijeet Sathe. We may have felt the emotions these stories tackle before, but we’ve never experienced them outside our own realist worldview until we turn to the imagined worlds of SF.
And then there are pieces in this issue that shift perspective nor only in terms of narration but in terms of their form. “My Darling” by Abhinav Bhat is framed as a found letter, translated from Tamil—a letter to a mathematics professor’s beloved that is chilling to read. And, as in every issue, we reprint a story in our online magazine that you may have only previously encountered in print form. Vajra Chandrasekera’s “THE DREADED NAME: THIRTY-NINE CROWDSOURCED ANNOTATIONS ON AN ANONYMOUS MANIFESTO PROMOTING TACTICAL HUMAN EXTINCTION,” first published in 2018, is told through annotations to a primary text we don’t get to see (remembering Lovecraft’s Necronomicon). Finally, Tasavvur’s nonfiction editor Mushba Said interviews Vajra on topics ranging from maintaining the balance between being writer and editor, to striking the balance between a big buzzword like “representation” and telling organic stories, all discussed amid power outages in true South Asian style. Putting this issue together was a real joy—picking a final list is always difficult!—but our editorial team returned to these stories again and again, and we hope you will too.
During the day, Mehak is doing her PhD at UC Berkeley, and is an editor at Qui Parle and its online complement Ki. Her academic work is at the intersections of contemporary Anglophone fiction, queer theory, post- and decolonial theory, and game studies. By night, she is a fiction writer, board game designer, and aspiring crossword-maker.