The Princess and the Frog: A Review of Gorel and the Pot Bellied God
Lavie Tidhar’s ‘guns and sorcery’ novella Gorel and the Pot Bellied God is a highly entertaining and exotic piece of genre fiction.
“All true knowing is mutual…”: Notes on Vandana Singh’s Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories
Singh’s stories in this collection present a new way of articulating planetarity and narrating the cosmos and map out a new terrain of science fictionality. She incorporates the fantastic, the magical and the wondrous to create a mythopoetic engagement with the cosmos.
Avatar: An English-Italian Anthology of Contemporary Science Fiction from India
Edited by Tarun K. Saint and Francesco Verso, Avatar is a good exhibition of India’s burgeoning science fiction writing community.
A Delicate Magic: Iona Datt Sharma’s Not For Use in Navigation
Iona Datt Sharma’s Not For Use in Navigation is a mélange of earthy magic, queer protagonists, love stories involving sentient spaceships, fables in the distant future, and much else.
Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse by S.B. Divya
There has been some debate in recent months over whether there exists a distinct writing endeavour that can be accurately described as “South Asian speculative fiction” – along the lines of Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, or Chinese SFF. Is there a coherence to the contemporary speculative fiction that is coming out of the several South Asian nations – a unity of theme, or style, or topics?
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth is wonderful, to say the least. I was not expecting to feel as much as I did, going into this book. Gideon and Harrow made me laugh almost every page, which I did not expect from a book about necromancers; and they made me bawl my eyes out by the end. Go read the book, you won’t be disappointed.
