Speculative fiction (SF) is a broad genre that includes everything from space opera to ghost stories, magical realism to time travel. And while it has a long history in India, nearly everything that's been published so far has been written by authors from privileged communities. Some of this work engages with social equality issues, but even when it does, it tends to be written from an urban, elite, anglophone, upper-caste/dominant caste perspective.
Join us on January 29th to celebrate an anthology of weird, fantastic fiction by writers from South Asia and the diaspora.
The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF represents our effort to collect the forays into anti-caste speculative fiction that have already been made, and to encourage some new ones. For the past year, we've been curating and commissioning SF stories that take anti-caste stances and launch them into the future, outer space, the lairs of nightmarish monsters, and bizarre dreamscapes.
We've put together around 350 pages of short stories (as well as a few comics), the majority by writers from caste-oppressed communities. Our book features a mix of original English short stories and works in translation, as well as a few comics/graphic narratives. Some are by well-known superstars of Dalit and Bahujan literature, others by emerging or newly-emerged authors. The list of writers includes: Bama (in translation from Tamil by Meena Kandasamy), Mimi Mondal, Sahej Rahal, Kunal Lokhande, Gogu Shyamala (in translation from Telugu by Divya Kalavala), Guatamiputra Kamble (in translation from Marathi by Sirus J. Libeiro), Sumit Kumar, and many more
A little about Blaft Publications (blaft.com): Blaft Publications is an independent publishing house based in Chennai, India. Since their launch in 2008, they've published English translations of pulp and genre fiction from Tamil, Hausa, Urdu, and (forthcoming) Gujarati; folk stories and ghostlore from Mizoram, Tamil Nadu, and all over India; graphic novels; weird Indian writing in English; zines; and lots more. Their list includes bestselling Indian and Pakistani crime novels, Nigerian soyayya fiction, experimental writing, pulp art, folktales, graphic novels, and picture books about young women who are in love with monsters.