The Secret History of Indian Science Fiction

Gautam Bhatia | AlterMag | Nov 22, 2025

“Sultana’s Dream,” then, is a work of proto-SF, anticipating many of the themes that would go on to shape the genre in the 20th century. Yet the story did not spring forth from a vacuum. Speculative imaginings had long been integral to the emerging-modern literary landscape of the Indian sub-continent. Tapping into older narrative forms – the epic and the dastan – but shaped by colonial political economy, the growing influence of the sciences, and a burgeoning print culture, these works formed the nucleus of an early-modern sub-continental tradition of speculative fiction and its many branches, including science fiction.

“The future is already here,” William Gibson once famously wrote, “it’s just not evenly distributed.” A particularly apt choice of words for a country where the levels of inequality are now worse than they were under colonial rule. In a world in which technology is often too quickly – and too easily – presented as a solution to intractable social problems, one of the roles that Indian SF is occupying, as articulated through these novels, is that of an anti-technocratic literature.

The Island Without Time

Shayla Love | The Atlantic | Dec 21, 2025

Since 2011, the researchers Tamar Avnet, at Yeshiva University, and Anne-Laure Sellier, at HEC Paris, have studied people’s preferences for living with time. Clock-timers, as Avnet and Sellier have dubbed them, do things based on what their watches say. But for event-timers, the exact minute or hour doesn’t matter. A clock-timer might wake up each day at 7 a.m., start working at 9 a.m., eat lunch at noon when it’s delivered, and get into bed at 10 p.m. An event-timer rejects the alarm clock, maybe waking up at 6 o’clock, maybe at 9. They’ll stop working when they feel a task is done, or eat when they get hungry, but at no predetermined time.

Despite such findings, Avnet and Sellier stressed to me that they don’t regard clock or event time as superior, and in truth, we all engage with both time styles. But it’s clock time that’s imposed on most of us from a young age, Kevin Birth, an anthropologist at CUNY Queens College, told me. Outside of vacation, most people don’t get the chance to embrace event time—even if it might suit them. In his 2015 book, the sociologist Hartmut Rosa wrote that modern humans crave detachment from social acceleration, which he defined as the increasing “experience per unit of time.” Perhaps that’s why so many people were charmed by the idea of a time-free zone.