I love it when the promise in an anthology’s preface is fulfilled. Co-editor RT Samuel writes that the entries in The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF – edited by Samuel, Rakesh Khanna, and Rashmi Ruth Devadasan – “range from philosophical slipstream to multi-format space adventures, alien horizons and reworked mythologies, cyborgs, demons, and world(s) yet-to-come […] race through alternate histories, weaving in and out of improbable futures, mystical dimensions and terraformed planets, taking an axe to what we think we know about the world and letting the light impossible seep into the cracks.” Speculative fiction is an umbrella term for fiction that imagines alternate realities. By virtue of definition, spec-fic creates the scope for challenging contemporary society’s first principles: gender, nation-state, caste etc. So, the idea of anti-caste SF is brimming with possibilities. At least, 15 out of 32 entries, which cover short stories, poetry, and graphic narratives, are between very good and great.
Reviewing an anthology, especially one with so much range, comes with its challenges. Obviously, not all the picks will be up to the mark. When the idea is to be inclusive first, the quality of storytelling isn’t always going to be fantastic.
A bazaar of ideas
I’ll start with the two stories I enjoyed the most: Blaft Director Rashmi Ruth Devadasan’s Meen Matters and V Chandrasekhar Rao’s The Last Radio Play, translated by Rohith.
Meen Matters is excerpted from Devadasan’s work-in-progress Zombies of Chennai, which Blaft is calling a “saripunk” novel. A dystopian Chennai is overrun with zombies, the moneyed have retreated into their villas, while street gangs have carved up the city among themselves. One such group is the all-woman The Birthday Gurlz from North Chennai, a part of the city widely regarded as populated with Dalits.
Meen Matters unfolds like a sci-fi zombie flick, written by Thiagarajan Kumararaja, directed by Karthik Subbaraj, and produced by Pa Ranjith. Among its endless charms is a white Ambassador car converted into a zombie-killing tank by the badass Gurlz. The story is dripping with swag, the prose is stylish and energetic. The go-for-broke energy brought to mind Carlton Melick III’s mad novel Zombies and Shit. Meen Matters even has a zombie-killing action sequence cued to an Ilaiyaraaja tune from a Rajinikanth movie. When the novel is finally out, I’ll be first in line to devour it.
When I finished The Last Radio Play, I felt an urgent desperation to immediately read everything by the writer V Chandrashekhar Rao. Contrary to whatever I said about Meen Matters, where I brought up this or that reference to signal the story’s genre mashups, The Last Radio Play is absolutely unclassifiable. Calling it magic-realist would be reductive but not incorrect. The way the story doesn’t just pull the rug from under your feet every three hundred words, but every revelation feels like a fog slowly clearing off a mirror and revealing your face, is extraordinary. And when the logic of the story is finally clear, the brute force of its millennia-old anguish will have bludgeoned you enough to never leave your mind.
Two stories I really loved were maximalist, postmodern, plot-less, bazaar of ideas.
The first, Sahej Rahal’s Hallucination Stream mixes 20th-century political philosophy, ancient South Asian history, Hindu mythology, media theory, and more, to sketch an inverted cosmology that shows the logic of caste system, nationalism, and late capitalism.
Within the first two hundred or so words, I was strongly hooked to the Ballardian prose style, the past written like science-fiction:
“1989. The Cold War’s shrouds of unknowing begin receding. Beneath the crumbling curtains of iron that drape the 20th century, a new world is born: the apocalyptic offspring of a planet split at the seams of the Berlin Wall. A world of firsts arrives, in birth pangs that announce the end of history.
It speaks in a language of flows. A networked mobility that can move unfettered by the archaic boundaries of nation-states. It promises market liberalisation as the final stage of human evolution.”
The other, Rahee Punyashloka’s The RV Society for Promotion of Underground Sci-Fi Writings, is a meta-story where the writer packages the idea behind the anthology as those of the fictional RV Society in a presumably rationalist, post-caste India. We get a dossier belonging to this society consisting of four anti-caste sci-fi novel ideas. All four are fantastic, particularly, the one about the sole surviving member of a tribe who turns into a serial killer. I am hoping Punyashloka will turn these ideas into full-fledged stories or novels.
A happy future
A quick look at some of my other favourites.
Mimi Mondal’s So It Was Foretold is a prose poem that goes straight for the jugular. Among Gautam Vegda’s poems and parables, The Extinction is a standout. Archita Mittra’s Happily Ever After is a fantastical, emotional story of a queer toymaker couple. Gitanjali Joshua’s Switch has an intelligent premise, not unlike the short stories of Greg Egan concerning identity, selfhood and consciousness, but less hard-sciency.
Hameedha Khan’s Flight No. 786 [The Night Journey] is a fascinating look at a possible solarpunk future. Shivani Kshirsagar’s The House Is Never Clean is a horrifying internet-age twist on The Yellow Wallpaper. Tamilmagan’s Chlamydom, translated by Nirmal Rajagopalan, has a charming idea, with dystopic horror buried underneath its easygoing prose. Gautamiputra Kamble’s Parivrajak, translated by Sirus J Libeiro, is a minimalist fable set in an unspecified time in a future about two individuals who travel across a ravaged land and find statues of Buddha in a cavern.
Sumit ‘Bakarmax’ Kumar’s comic Spacewali is a sad-funny take on futuristic Indians dragging the caste system into outer space. Yeshwanth Mocharla's comic Looly Cooly is a lovely, painstakingly sketched story of a Snow Crash-style food delivery biker. Sudarshan Devadoss and MK Abhilash’s Margin Mag is a wholesome prototype of a sci-fi anti-caste mag that must exist in the real world.
Blaft has an enthusiastic army of fans who happily raised the funds the company required on Kickstarter to get this project rolling. Looking at their Kickstarter page, I see the company seriously committed to publishing more anti-caste fiction. Their plans, among others, include rolling out short story collections from PA Uthaman and Gautamiputra Kamble.
This is a fertile time for Indian spec-fic. Last year’s Locus Award nominations included Samit Basu’s The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport and Shirley Jackson award winner Indrapramit Das’s The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar. Soon after, Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s novel The Ten Per Cent Thief got shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award. Mimi Mondal, included in the anthology, is already a star in the scene with Hugo and Locus Award nominations in her belt. With Blaft throwing its weight behind the genre, after it did the same for Tamil and Gujarati pulp fiction, the next decade will hopefully see a massive boom for Indian speculative fiction.
The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF, edited by RT Samuel, Rakesh Khanna, and Rashmi Ruth Devadasan, Blaft Publications.
