Words for Worlds - Issue 86 (2024 Indian SF special issue)
Hello everyone, and welcome to the final 2024 issue of Words for Worlds.
To bring the curtains down on 2024, I’m going with a different format for this issue (it is a fifth-Monday issue after all!): I’m going to bring together all the book-length Indian SF published this year. So, if there’s something you’ve missed out on in the course of the year, now’s the time to rectify that!
By any standard, 2024 has been a remarkable year for Indian SF. On my count, there are nine distinct book-length SF works published by Indians this year, and they range across the spectrum of genre (science fiction, fantasy, spec fic) and format (novels, short story collections, anthologies), comprising both debuts as well as non-debuts, and books published in India as well as abroad. This is quite a change from recent times, when an entire year would go by without an Indian SF book, or with just a solitary one!
So, without further ado, here goes:
Idolatry, by Aditya Sudarshan (Flame Tree Press, January 2024).
Not Aditya Sudarshan’s first novel, but perhaps the first that is explicitly science-fictional: set in a near-future Mumbai, where a new technology called “shrine-tech” has quite literally privatised religion, and sharpened the already-existing social fault-lines in a city like Mumbai.
Biopeculiar, by Gigi Ganguly (Westland IF, April 2024).
The first in IF - Westland India’s new imprint dedicated to SF - Biopeculiar is a mosaic collection of short stories that explores climate change, often through a non-anthropomorphic lens (look out for the story written from the perspective of a cloud!).
The Garden of Delights, by Amal Singh (Flame Tree Press, May 2024).
Another Flame Tree Press publication, The Garden of Delights is at that fascinating intersection of science fiction and fantasy, where SF-nal themes lie nested within fantasy-esque prose and settings.
Shadows Rising, by Rohan Monteiro (Westland, June 2024).
Another Mumbai SF novel, and another Westland SF novel: Montairo’s Shadows Rising is, however, the only example of urban fantasy on this list, an SF sub-genre that we will, hopefully, see more of in the years to come.
The Spice Gate, by Prashanth Srivatsa (Harper, July 2024).
Prashanth’s debut novel is firmly within the tradition of high fantasy, but with a very distinctively Indian slant: themes of colonialism, social hierarchies, and rebellion are woven into a story that has the spice trade at its heart.
The Sentence, by Gautam Bhatia (Westland IF, October 2024).
I think I’ve described this novel often enough in this newsletter - if you’re a reader, you probably already know what it’s about! I’ll only add that it is the second original SF publication in Westland’s IF imprint, after Biopeculiar.
Interstellar Megachef, by Lavanya Lakshminarayan (Harper, November 2024).
After The Ten-Percent Thief, Lavanya Lakshminarayan returns with the first book in The Flavour Hacker series, Interstellar Megachef, far-future SF where themes of food and food production and consumption, and colonialism, intersect.
The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF (Blaft, December 2024).
And rounding off this list is The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF: the title is self-explanatory, and within its pages, you will find various forms - short stories, graphic works, poetry, and art. Definitely the first of its kind, and hopefully the precursor to many more!
Acts of God, by Kanan Gill (Harper, January 2024)
Or not rounding off after all, because I forgot on the first pass that Acts of God also came out in early 2024 (I’d read an ARC in 2023). Kanan Gill’s debut plays with the classic SF-nal themes of causality and multiple-worlds, encased within a framework of self-referential irony.
And there we have it: that’s a wrap for 2024 Indian SF, and hopefully there’s something in here to pique your interest sufficiently enough to buy, read - and support - Indian SF. Hopefully, 2025 will be an even better year!