Anthology reimagines future using speculative fiction

What if the future wasnt something that happened to us but something we imagined, analysed and wrote into being? This quest is what speculative fiction is all about, a genre that thrives to find an answer between what it is and what it could be. At a recent discussion at Champaca Bookstore, in Vasanth Nagar, the anthology Between Worlds (599, Westland Books), edited by writer and lawyer Gautam Bhatia, became the focal point for such imaginative possibilities. The book brings together short stories by eleven writers. Alongside Bhatia, contributors of the book, writers Srividya Tadepalli, Prashanth Srivatsa, Suchitra Sukumar and Priyamvadha Shivaji got candid about the book that doesnt simply dabble in a futuristic utopian world but offers a vivid picture of using speculative fiction to respond to real global questions like climate collapse, moral cost of technology, migration, memory and identity. When you mention Indian speculative fiction, people often ask, Whats that? or think of Star Trek. The idea was to change that perception, says Bhatia, recalling the origin of the book. Breaking the usual gate-kept commissioning process, the anthology was built purely through a blind submission model, receiving over 400 entries. And half of the selected stories came from debut writers. The process reminded me how diverse and unexpected good storytelling can be, he adds. As the panellists shared, Between Worlds is as much about the present as it is about the future. Srivatsas story, Muniyamma , follows a robot imbued with the spirit of a 102-year-old woman sent to solve a crisis on a distant planet. Its set in outer space, but its rooted in stories I grew up with, of mothers and grandmothers, of how resilience travels through generations, he explains. For Shivaji, the story Sudden Showers began as a fantasy and turned into a deeply personal coming-of-age story about women stranded on an island. I wrote it during a rainy day in Bengaluru. It began as world-building and became about human connection, she shares. Each story in the anthology approaches the what if concept differently. From alternate histories and parallel realities to indepth human tales set against speculative backdrops, the book blurs the line between myth and modernity. While writer Tadepallis Tomorrows Ancestors is about a domestic worker named Bhanu and her daughter as they get visited by the formers great-great-granddaughter from the future, Sukumars A Rough-Edged Confection introduces readers to Janaki, a middle-aged woman who gains a super power. Im trying to show characters that are a little more complex than the broad strokes in which a Western author might read Indian characters and to write about where we are, not as a borrowed setting but as our own imagined world, Sukumar emphasises. About the hurdles of putting together many worlds of different writers into an anthology, Bhatia says,It was very challenging because every editor has biases. My bias as a science fiction reader and writer is towards the more space opera kind of fiction. But as an editor, you have to get over that and just look for a good story and ask does it move me? Does it have all the emotional beats? Because thats what you ultimately have to go by, he concludes.