The conversation has also become globally more diverse. The success of Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem (2008) led to an explosion of translated Chinese science fiction into the English-language market, a genre “boom” reminiscent in some ways of the Latin American “boom” in the 1960s. Meanwhile, “Afrofuturism” and “Africanfuturism” are terms that have long been familiar within the SF industry – and now, to an extent, outside the industry as well. While questions remain about how publishing power remains concentrated within the Global North, there is little doubt that English-language SF is, today, at least relatively more global than it has ever been.  

What of India? In terms of volume, the last decade has seen a growth in the number of English-language SF books being published by Indian writers, to the point where perhaps for the first time in history, the question “Is there something distinctive that we can call Indian SF?” can even be posed.²⁶ As with all such questions, there is danger in categorisation, in excluding through inclusion;²⁷ and the creating of canons is always a political act. What follows, therefore, is not meant to be a “list” of contemporary Indian SF or of contemporary Indian SF writers,²⁸ but rather, a broad-brush outline of some of the themes that preoccupy contemporary Indian SF, and the contexts in which they do so. 

A good – albeit potentially perilous – place to start with is anthologies. The most expansive such attempt in recent years has been the two volumes of the Gollancz Anthology of South Asian Science Fiction (2019). In my review essay of Volume I of the anthology, I identified three themes that ran through the collection of otherwise distinct stories: first, a concern with the growth of technology, and its impact on the existing social and political cleavages in India; secondly, with climate change and the “unevenly distributed” future that it would bring for a country like India; and thirdly, how India’s recent history of social violence (on the lines of religion, and caste, and gender) informs its present and constrains its future(s).²⁹ 

Beyond the Gollancz Anthology, I think this schema – with one addition that I will discuss below – presents a helpful approach to understanding contemporary Indian SF.³⁰ To live in India today is to be keenly aware of each of these three fault-lines that run through our society. Perhaps the largest set of contemporary Indian SF works, therefore, is set in the near future, where these fault-lines can be probed at the point of occlusion.³¹