Warning: this piece may contain spoilers for stories mentioned.
One of my life’s greatest joys is the fact that I am alive to witness the South Asian speculative fiction scene flourish—to witness it evolve into an era that will be referenced in the years to come. When I was first introduced to the genre in 2018, I had began to learn the names of the few Pakistani authors writing speculative fiction in English, and also learn what speculative fiction even was. Three years later, I now sit in a corner of my home, writing this as a new spec-fic writer who has discovered a larger community of South Asian spec-fic writers, and with them, discovered the breadth and depth of the genre.
Speculative fiction asks you to do one simple thing: Hypothesize what the future could look like; the more impossible it seems, the better. So is it going to be shiny with flying cars like The Jetsons? Or hopeless and savage like Mad Max? Or—or, hear me out, maybe it’s this outrageous future which doesn’t center white and western voices at all? After all, the idea that heroes, empires, and other complexities of life can exist outside of the West does feel pretty wild by today’s standards. But the beauty of speculative fiction is that it is a genre so eager that it asks you to speculate every aspect of what you’re writing, including who is telling the story, and who the story is being written for. One could argue that perhaps the truest form of speculative fiction is one in which Othered folks, i.e. those of us who cannot imagine a future for ourselves, decide to create one by writing it, and in doing so, take the possibility of a singular future that doesn’t belong to us and multiply into numerous futures––because shouldn’t we all be able to lay claim to our own futures?
This process of claiming and consequently reclaiming futures can take on many forms. It can look like the undersea railway engineer from Varsha Dinesh’s piece, in which a woman who defies the cackling cries of conforming to social expectations of marriage and family in exchange for a career worthy of her genius, but at the same time Dinesh adds nuance to this portrayal by showing us a woman whose maternal instincts emerge in a different way as she creates life on her own terms. Other times reclaiming the future can look like creating hope in a hopeless time, such as in Saad Z. Hossain’s piece, where an unlikely group of friends relegated to a bleak existence find a way to thrive in a dystopian Dhaka, angering the authorities that only gave them permission to survive. But why stop at the future? What about the past? In Chaitanya Murali’s Just One Last Mango, we see what starts out as childhood mischief leading to the reclamation of a tender, loving relationship between two men—two kings––whose love is celebrated in their past, and is a love that withstands the curse of time.
When I look back at all these pieces, I recall the first time I read them. Each time there was a giddy joy at seeing a world that felt familiar but was still full of insurmountable wonder. And each time I felt a corner of my heart fester with that terrible thing called hope, that terrible thing that makes you think that things are possible for someone like you.
At a time when South Asia is giving into its colonial hangover and increasingly Othering and hate-mongering against marginalized communities, such as the working class, minority castes/faiths, and the queer community—the trans community in particular—Murali’s piece reminded me that these communities we seek to hate were once our own (and remain our own despite the hate)—that these communities exist as something more than the Other. Seeing the presence of these communities in stories in a form that is not violently parading our oppression but rather showing us what we can be, albeit in different realms, doesn’t just give you hope, but reminds you how radical the practice of existing as humans can be, and how often we forget that humanity.
In Arula Ratnakar’s stunning novella Submergence, we witness the reclamation of a future where a new love sprouts for two women in between the intricacies of a scientific investigation, all while raising a neurodivergent child. It isn’t the science in the story that makes the story layered—Ratnakar has done too lovely a job of smoothly sailing the reader through the scientific knowledge—but rather witnessing queer women whose love isn’t some fetishized afterthought but rather an equally complex and complimentary layer to the story which primarily centers around these women being literal geniuses in their field.
In Sameem Siddiqui’s Airbody, we could see a future being reclaimed for two lovers at a later stage in life—at a stage when they’re done performing for social eyes as good mothers and wives, and return, even just for a day, to the love of their youth, albeit through the strange scenario of a surrogate body. From the traditional aunty renting our main character’s body who turned out to be visiting to see her former love, to being reminded of how older, queer love is often forgotten and unseen, Siddiqui’s story manages to linger in your heart for it’s lightness and sweetness.
When we think about it, being South Asian on this planet is already Othering enough, but in a global context. When you add queerness to the mix, the Otherness stacks up in a local context. This is not to disregard the intersectionality of other aspects of identity/existence that contribute to an individual’s or community’s oppression, but when we consider that many queers, especially trans folks in South Asia, are often from working class backgrounds and don’t have basic public access to things like healthcare, it becomes heart-breakingly obvious how the Othering of trans and queer folks not only involves systemic obstacles, but how this Othering often robs us of our humanity socially. And within the exhausting performance of survival, it is very easy for us to forget our humanity ourselves—to forget that humanity entails many things, from the right to exist, to the right to dream and see ourselves as something more.
In a world that seeks to deny us homes in any present, hopes of any future, and to erase any semblance of our existence in history and keeps us shackled to the colonial baggage that is cis-heteronormativity, one finds that speculative fiction and fantasy lend themselves rather easily to queer stories. Perhaps it’s because of how experienced the queer community is in creating futures and homes for themselves, and fostering all the elements that make up a home such as joy, love, and hope, because this simple process of fostering life and surviving is a constant practice of speculation in itself. Is it possible to live our truth? Is it possible to make this work? Is it possible?
I do believe that speculative fiction and fantasy are beautiful genres for all the ways that they offer us an invaluable space to etch out a place for ourselves that we can’t find in our present reality—that those of us who feel Othered amongst our own delve into these genres as both readers and writers. But more than that, I think I’m simply here to tell you about one of my life’s other greatest joys: Being able to read and believe in stories where I see myself live, and maybe even thrive.