Two years have passed since the last blogpost. Much has happened: authors must grieve the twin deaths of Alice Munro (May 2024), the poetic genius in short format, a writer of nostalgia for lives we never lived, and Paul Auster (April 2024), the textual illusionist, meandering through subjectivity and identity. If writers are distant friends, if books are their letters, must we not be sad at loss of such genuine correspondence?

Little must be written here, much elided over. Perhaps there will be time to return to Munro’s provocations, her controversial life and storytelling. Here, we have Auster: Auster who penned the private eye/I, the subjective singularity that engulfs his characters, his plots, his cities, his readers, him; Auster who was a kaleidoscope within his own stories of so many different personas: the Rothesque ghostwriter shadowing other artists, the archivist copiously chronicling his own cities through his own characters, the detective of imagined crimes, the seer and seen, the author and authored. To read Auster is to see New York differently, like it is to read Joyce and see Dublin differently. The mechanism, however, is different. Joyce presents a measured profligacy; Auster presents redundant minimality. Auster sees the world as if from a pinhole camera and then redoubles the blurry edges over, and over, and over, until the contours of a story emerge.

My relationship with Auster has been tenuous. I had always held him at a distance — his evocative premises, fixation on language and misinterpretation, error and frailty at odds with the scale of life I concerned myself with. Except, Auster beckoned me to look at the oddities even in this scale, in its repetitions, its frictions and its slippages. In the previous post, I had mentioned that I would implicate Auster when discussing our engagement with speculation. It is odd, remembering someone one day and finding them departed the next.

It is also odd to open an opinion piece on speculative fiction with literary fiction authors. Colour me biassed. I would love to speak of similarities in the mathematical worlds of Abott and Lem, of cultural distinctions that we routinely draw in these genres, of time and its evolution through time. But there are times when one must view the earth from the moon, when one must assay a country from another, when genres appear suddenly warped from another. That is the idea.

In his famed New York Trilogy,¹ Auster speaks of truth, detection and detectives. Unlike conventional detectives, a Sam Spade, a Sherlock Holmes, a Miss Marple, characters whose shadow pervades the plot, whose larger-than-life identity provides solid ground on which you are willing to bet the truth, characters who linearise time: from not knowing to knowing, each chapter an increment, a nugget of wisdom, Auster’s detectives are diffuse, anonymous (and thus autonomous). There is a sense, in his works, that time is playing tricks on you, that the past will face you at the next intersection as your future, as your alter ego whose life is on a different trajectory.

Strewn throughout his works, therefore, are indicators of an identity that do not cohere. A detective watches a mark even as he feels watched, a wretched cog in an absurd game of waiting, not acting. A horde of identities seem to erupt from the page: the detective, sometimes Daniel Quinn, sometimes Paul Auster (the character? the author? the pseudonym?) seem to speak simultaneously. A man involves himself with the life of Hector Mann, actor in silent movies, whose life on camera he brilliantly recalls in remarkable detail. Always, there is the idea that one life has been trapped by another, caught in a web, where in all directions what radiates is yet another strand of a life that one seems to be distantly living. Therefore of being under perusal from this distance, an inability to walk in your own skin as your own person.

In such a complex field, the ‘I’, argues Auster, is a sinkhole. It is at once the authoritative Investigator, the intimate Subject and the roving Private Eye, and the attractor for all such identities which entangles with yours. Through desire, through imitation, through surveillance and consumption, through comparison, the ‘I’ repeatedly contracts the other, measures up against it and then sinks it. I call this idea the ghost: a way of living that takes you on a collision course with somebody else’s life. As Brockmeier says: “It would take so little. Why didn’t it happen?”²

To live as a ghost is to live on the knife-edge of absolute subjection and absolute freedom, a curious phantasmic life indeed. It is a virtual unity of contradictions, a life where saying: how can I be other than what I eventually will be? is to simultaneously declare yourself free from the clutches of your own future. Every action is lent significance in the future; each passing desire, each obligatory act — are we not always susceptible to being looked back at in ten years, with a future us saying: this is not so; it was never meant to be so. Read Carloff (Time Heist), who writes about the present being continuously botched up by knowledge that things will reset. Or McCaffrey (Central Time), for whom the present is inundated with constraints. The horror of time is thrown open to us precisely when we let ourselves be determined by the future; should we not instead declare that the future will be what it will be, and thus declare ourselves free? An empty freedom indeed! But the ghost reminds us that all freedom is, in the final analysis, empty, a declaration sans creation.

Auster navigates through this subjection-freedom. There is always the terminus of what one must become; the end has always been in sight. What constitutes the story is the progression towards the end, the becoming of a pure subject, the possession of the body of the other, the ticking into pure freedom.

What does it matter to us? Here, let us return to Bachelard again who writes: “… the joy of reading is the reflection of the joy of writing, as though the reader were the writer’s ghost.”³ No reader, says Bachelard, reads without trying to become the writer. To the extent that a modest reader is kept in place is by the sheer genius of the writer himself. The good writer maintains a ghostly reader, there to be possessed but resisting possession. She is the hero of every horror genre who keeps the ghost at bay, who resists every attempt on her body, on her soul. The reader, in his turn, must attempt a seizure, a subjection-freedom, a possession; that is the fulfilment of his desire.

In this curious setting, Bachelard hints at an equally curious idea. Who here is creative if not the reader? The writer, through the text, is present as if objectively. It is the reader who must move the text and be moved by it in turn. It is his gaze, his experience of the text, that is Bachelard’s central concern. The writer is relegated to the margins, the significant other. This is an inverted horror movie, one where we enter the lives of the ghosts and see them haunting the real world. The selection by the reader is the artistic act, insofar as art is the experience of expression of desire.

Through Auster then, we find what it is to be a hungry artist, continuously trying to meld with the world. In the pieces that we shall publish this year, especially the entries from our Faux Tales contest, this is what we have continuously tried to do. Which story among these would I have written; who is the author we would have anyway become if we were to become the Author?

There is, of course, a silly way of reading this entire idea as hubris. Are we therefore saying that we could have written the story in spite of the author? Are we not therefore saying that the author is a mere accident, a chancy being who got there first, planted their flags on terrain that was otherwise our manifest destiny? This is not what I mean by the ghost. The ghost does not exist without man, the reader without the writer, the editor / magazine without our authors. In the absence of the author, there is no future that we can emptily gesture towards. It is only when our authors write these stories that they bring into the world the conditions of our freedom; it is only by pointing at them, their expression, their words, that we say: there, that is exactly what I would have wanted to say anyway. There is no predestination because there is no future yet — the future will be in its own time — there is only a freedom from the future that we seek.

Consider, in this vein, Vajra Chandrasekera’s comments (The Limner Wrings His Hands) on the author-machine. Begin reading where it allegedly ends: “This story was generated by the machinic state, the prison within the prison like the text within the text, the state of the machine, the machine ulcerated, the machine cold but learning… To fight gods, especially gods that you made, you must become monstrous.” End where he begins: “This story is a monster; that is to say, this story is written by a monster. That is, that is to say, a monster is a mantra, a maniac, a (de)monstration, a (demon)stration, a(n auto)maton, a matos, an emanation of the manas.” In between, you might find him saying that the author-artist does authorship-artistry only when throws open his own subjection to the universe, only when he absolves his own subjection. Art here is not unlike faith: the artist does not make a spectacle of the prison; he short-circuits the transition between the reading of the prison and the finding oneself within it. This is the artistic function.

This is also a lesson in temporal intimacy, a coming together at every moment of our anticipation for tomorrow. Call it what you will: a textual tryst, a speculative romance, a political solidarity; these are but labels of a gnawing metaphysics of time. And it requires other intimacies, some cultural, some genetic, some interactional. The question then is who or what emerges from these intimacies, and whether such emergence may be truly called South Asian. What are the peculiarities of South Asian speculative fiction, and is there some truth to South Asian experiences that can serve as a criterion for categorizing stories?

In time, I will write about this.

Notes

1. Auster, P. (1990). The New York trilogy. Penguin. ︎
2. Brockmeier, K. (2021). Pieces of elsewhere: The horizontal and the vertical in character and fiction. Sewanee Review, 130(4), 735–765. ︎
3. Bachelard, G. (2014). The poetics of space (M. Jolas, Trans.). Penguin. (Original work published 1958) ︎

Let us call this piece an interruption.

My plan was to write a series of posts detailing our criteria for selecting stories for State of Matter. I would start, as I did in the last post, with the movie Ratatouille and the problematics of time when we encounter something ‘novel’. To understand something as new, I would argue, is to understand it as a rupture in time. The next entry would be inspired by Auster’s New York Trilogy, and the motif of the detective that he builds, and how a character becomes the sinkhole for everybody else. However, between these pieces, a rift has opened up. A new temporality, it would seem, has revealed itself.

Last month, Tahatto put up its play, Love in the Cholera of Time. A review, it would seem, has demanded itself.

The play has aged past its initial runs. Last year, when Jagriti Theatre put it up, a friend brought it to my attention. He told me that it combined many of my interests: time, Marquez, meta-textuality, the experience of non-linearity, the theatre, the incorporation of an audience in what is supposed to be a contained act, the body and its orientations and its movement — themes that escape conventional discussion. Since that day, and until this kind-of-review is published, I am already a few beats of the cosmos too late. Tahatto has organised this play multiple times in different cities, most recently in Delhi.

Perhaps the review would be better suited if I could point to an upcoming show and link to it. That does not seem possible right now. Then again, I may defer to the celebration of non-linearity within the play, hoping that not all of the past is lost, and not all of a future is exhausted in anticipation.

This delay gives my kind-of-review some breathing space. Other places (see reviews in The Hindu and Indulge Express, for instance) have already spoken about the motivation, preparation and organisation of the play. But because I am late, I can skimp on the summaries, the temptations, the causal linkages from page to stage. This review might be stationed outside of chronological time. Let us call this a transverse time, and remember Bachelard again,¹ who tells us that the present instant, the now, sits resolutely outside of the continuous flow of time. He says that in this now, we may experience a multiplicity of experience, without necessarily arguing what comes before and what comes after. We may ask then what it would be to review a work of art, a play, a composition, a story, standing not before nor after the piece, but by its side, or vertically above it. What must we speak about to speak about the play?

Time? Cholera? Or just plain old love? Perhaps, like Bachelard proposes, I need to be inspired by a poetic image, allow its reverberations to unsettle me.

Let me start with time. Let me also be pedantic for a moment, revisiting that century-old scientific breakthrough that is Einsteinian relativity. Einstein, invoked in the descriptions of the play, proposes that space-time does not offer us a certain Archimedean position. In his careful descriptions, clocks and rulers lose their solidity: they stretch and skew, they enmesh what they measure (time, space, time-space!) and they demand always a trace of where they measure it from.² In doing so, Einstein upsets our tripartite categories of time. No longer is time merely a matter of the past behind the present behind the future! A new category appears: the “absolute elsewhere”, that livezone of other happenings from which light cannot make it to the ‘here-now’, or to where light from here-now may not reach. This may just be the transverse zone (of escape? of desire? of political possibility?) in which the past reaches out to a different life, from which the future will have eventually become possible.³

It seems that in these places, we come unstuck in time. Like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse V, who found himself loosened in the temporal flow, the characters of the play find themselves pushed outside the here-now, outside enclosures (of marriage, of prison), to meet in an other-zone. Where? When? In a time neither His nor Hers, not in-between either. The play opens with a juxtaposition outside prosaic time: a playful sort of beginning that has no ‘bearing’ upon a strict sequence of events the way conventional narratives do. What if the moon was made of cheese? Not a what-if that burgeons into a science fiction narrative, but a what-if unburdened from its own future. The question leads nowhere important, but is revived again and again, gaining currency in its recurrence. The first rule of the other-zone is that there is no rigorous plot: there is just idyllic romance around the moon, which splits, like Debussy’s reprises, throughout the play.

If I were to point to the strength of the play, I would point to this… this playfulness of its scenes. A play as play, whoever could think of that! Notice at the same time the sheer fluidity with which it indulges its audience in the time-settings of its characters. Almost to the extent where you feel that it is your anticipation that makes characters meet and speak on stage. To an extent where the audience intimately perceives multiple modalities at work: a visuality among the cast interacting with the stage, the rising music, that artistic sensibility of time that we insipidly call pacing…

But the critic is condemned to seriously engage even with playfulness! To speak a little about the stylistics and the themes of the production.

We folks begin as beings with brute speech; art, perhaps, is our development into nuanced language. When we first come across Einsteinian time, we say, “Time is non-linear,” to sketch its broad contours. Linearity is a Cartesian gridline; it is to act per rules, to realise freedom with reference to an overarching rulebook. Chronology is linearity in time. The play’s the thing that substantiates non-linearity: in marking time this way or that, it points us toward the dramatic curve that our own lives occupy. Is time all-knowing? Is all already known? Can there be no surprise from this moment to the next?

The distance between a broad non-chronology — the time guardians would explain to you as the play begins — and how the act will be chronologically structured for ‘you’, the viewer, is what sets up its tension. There are, on one hand, the themes of destiny and certainty. The Nation is under construction; we know that it will become independent; that is history. Our own world will see the proliferation of dehumanisation, such as the business of deleting old social media accounts; we may predict this much future; that is sociopolitics.⁴ The power of a thousand Black Holes will be unleashed; the device that the actor hands the audience member must be of some import; that is good storytelling! On the other hand, there is desire, there is the possibility of chance. Will He and She meet again? Might the Moon be really made of cheese?⁵ The play shores up and lets go of this tension with metric certainty, playing upon an irony with the audience. And this too is its way of drawing the audience into its own telling. Here, when He reveals a fact that is Her proper future, the audience is in on the joke — we laugh at the characters. There, when the audience is treated as mere ‘humans’, limited in the way they understand time, the audience is the butt of the joke — we laugh at ourselves. And then, when someone asks out loud, “What sort of a question is And then?” we are not sure what to laugh at, because so central is this question to the telling of a story that the joke seems targeted to every one of us, the actors, the audience, the fictional characters, the multiple allusions, perhaps even the city itself.

Enough about time; there is also cholera and love, the signals for passion and romance, evoking that strange combination that is Marquez’ story.⁶

Marquez gives us Him and Her, Florentino and Fermina, whose soft names constantly interrupt the world of the novel. Cholera, water-borne, a disease from the very thing that must sustain you, is perhaps in this regard much like love. And I have “confused cholera with love, of course” like Marquez’ character. The afflicted man in either case displays all the signs of a lack of health, a paleness that persists somewhere deeper than his bones. His passions run wild; he retches his insides out. Bleeding from every orifice, he realises that he is a dead man walking, talking, acting out a part not his own. Love, the choleric kind, erupts. Perhaps, love in the cholera of time should erupt too. That evocation is missed in the play; that kind of love impinges itself as an absence in the play. That feels like a loss.

What is this temporal syndrome, this ‘cholera-of-time’? In his landmark work on perception, Merleau-Ponty says that time-instants are telegraphed, embodied totalities⁷ — you find yourself a Russian doll, stacked as moment within moment within moment, each moment a full life — and that moments do not die, but remain open like a wound. Love, the choleric kind, then, persists multiply and totally because you encounter it along many worldlines, chaotically and surprisingly arranged. A full life here, and here again, and then, and then again. What better way to tell a love story then than to tell it as a series of images that stand relatively alone, among which you see not at first a narrative but a reverberation, where scenes do not follow or precede other scenes but contract them, like one contracts an illness. What is written now exists autonomously in the past: a letter, a rose find themselves travelling in time, characters have memories of the future and anticipate the past. And just like that, life is brought up short by time.

Surely the operational concept is that of movement. Surely, disturbing the nature of time must cause paradoxes of motion. If love may be encountered along all possible worldlines, if I may enter it faltering and stumbling, open doors to it and briskly walk in, be whisked away into the past or slip, violating some physical laws, into the absolute elsewhere of my own existence, how may I go about making such a huge range of motion possible? The characters must mount a difficulty with an obvious answer, that which in Boulder,⁸ Baltasar explains with surprising clarity, “But all this tunneling has opened rifts through which the captive parts of me have started to emerge.” Against the inner borders of the tripartite stage-set, the characters must thrust and recede and tunnel: at the right time, after all, these borders have to be transgressed for Him and Her to appear elsewhere. It feels in such moments of transgression that the extended gag to open a door for a performance appraisal, or the conversation with a parent across prison walls — that these are conditioning possibilities; that these mundane motions make the extraordinary flights of the characters possible. The play hints at these minor confinements, these minor escapes, until it is time for a major escape, a major stumbling into a transverse world with another. If there is a concern, it is only that these possibilities skew more toward Him than Her, that He has been apportioned more of the conditions of motion than She.

But let me not nitpick here. Let me insist that in the play, love possesses some allure. Love’s preferred symbol, like in poetry, is the moon. Here, the play becomes indulgent, especially with Debussy’s Clair de Lune. The moon, like in Calvino’s cosmology, becomes desire and its fulfilment, fantasy and its reason, the promise of and pining for love. The moon, we are told, holds hands with the earth the way lovers must hold hands. Scientifically, it is of interest that the moon is a poor companion: it is drifting away from us a little each day. Scientifically, it is also of interest that the earth and the moon do not hold hands; their motion is, perhaps, best described as falling past each other at immense speeds, a constant choreography of sidestepping the other. There is thus in this romance, some wish-fulfilment, some pure fiction. Surely, something in this romance might interrupt the celestial motion of the planets. Surely, something in this romance might even stop time.

Of course, that happens… In perhaps one of the more explosive displays of telling a story, time slows. The actors slowly lunge at one another, falling past one another with insufficient speed. It is the acting out of slow motion, an effect which might be borrowed partly from slapstick, partly from old Bollywood, partly from the history of movement on stage. It is cathartic (look, the device that had been foreshadowed has been used!), comical (look they are jumping and tumbling!), intense (where is this sequence going?). Almost everybody who walked out of the theatre with me marvelled at this sequence. Weeks later, they could remember the visuals from the scene. “Like a movie,” said someone, offering that paradigmatic comparison that we often make for excellence in visuality. “Like time actually slowed,” said someone else, as if time actually hadn’t! My favourite comparison comes from a friend who has the disappointing habit of stating the answer obviously embedded in the question. “Like in love,” they said.

Yes, like that.

Notes

1. Bachelard, G. (2013). Intuition of the instant (E. Rizo-Patron, Trans.). Northwestern University Press. (Original work published 1932).
2. Ismael, J. (2021). Time: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press. See sections on Einstein for a quick summary. Most of the reproduction here is succinctly presented in Ismael’s work.
3. It is tempting here to cite so much of Bergson, whose historic debate with Einstein spells out much of twentieth-century tussles between the great disciplines. See for instance:
   Bergson, H, (1930). The possible and the real (DVL, Trans.). Bergsonian.org. https://bergsonian.org/the-possible-and-the-real/
4. Here, of course, a host of texts come to mind. For a relatively accessible and recent TV series, see Upload.
   Daniels, G. (2020). Upload. Amazon Prime Video.
5. Of course, one does not talk about the Moon this way and forget Calvino’s Cosmicomics, and the many degrees of desire and liminality that it suggests.
   Calvino, I. (2010). The complete cosmicomics. Penguin. (Originally published 1965).
6. Márquez, G. G. (2003). Love in the time of cholera (E. Grossman, Trans.). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. (Originally published 1985).
7. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945). Phenomenology of perception. Routledge.
8. Baltasar, E. (2022). Boulder (J. Sanches, Trans.). And Other Stories.

To this, add the image of the dispassionate critic, Ego, who in the final act of Ratatouille enters into an aesthetic agreement with life.² Such agreement is rare; it occurs in that thick instant that Bachelard imagines, where you sense so many oppositions in such little life! Envy, but also fulfilment; loss, but also plenitude; sinking depth where all at once the entirety of your life seems touched by the present. Nothing could have prepared Ego for the titular dish, yet his entire life suddenly seems reverberant with its taste.³

What might you not do in such a moment? Ego chooses to act, for he reverses his own critical enterprise, for he chooses, when faced with food that is art that is life, to revise his own conservatism. He reorients the past and envisions a project for the future, one that he names “the discovery and defence of the new”, a private principle that is recursive enough that his own movement becomes the thrust of the tale, the spark of the story, the one-message-you-take-away if you will. Ego has, perhaps after a long time, been revealed to himself. It is as if he has become aware of the solidity of his body when touching it from the outside.

In his private room, we must see him struggle with himself to develop this criterion that he calls the new. He types, but now and then he pauses to gaze upon the world from a summit, balanced precariously on his own toes. He does not have a clear recourse to the past in words; the novelty he seeks is the one that he is now swept up within. His critique is neither given, nor motivated as if he were writing about something distantly remembered; instead, his words speak repeatedly about the very experience he is caught up within.

I feel that in the little space Ego concedes in the movie—surely Paris must not be overrun by rats in toques!—he allows art to change him. In doing so, he conducts himself with a certain kind of bravery that Le Guin demands of her writers.⁴ Le Guin asks that brave writers write Truth; Ego demands that brave critics defend Novelty. Le Guin’s writers are not divorced from the world that already is; Ego’s critics are not divorced from art that already makes certain demands. Le Guin’s writers point to what is written and say, “This here is the truth, if you will have it”; Ego’s critics point to what is critiqued and say, “This here is the new, if you will have it.” Central to either enterprise, the way I see it, is to commit to something that holds you inescapably.

With State of Matter, we asked if we could create conditions for a commitment to the new. And in turn, we found ourselves entrenched in the verticality of our own experience. Always, despite sustaining an arduous engagement with a literary or cultural tradition, we found ourselves rising transversely with an ambiguity that refused to be settled. We found ourselves discussing not being determined by our past, our names, or the received wisdom about our geographies. We wanted, perhaps in other words, an alternative that we feel is central to speculative fiction, an alternative that makes demands for its own novelty, an alternative that forces you to reckon with it as new.

Let me borrow a metaphor from space-fiction: terraforming, the ecoscaping action that creates conditions for living. A story that terraforms does not settle within a given cosmology, a pre-existing arrangement of things, but forces us to confront the machine arms thrusting into our souls. There is nothing in our past that provides it space amenable for living; it must create within us these conditions, and propel us into that which cannot be foreseen.

Consider a story of first contact, whose brute form we know too well—of course there is nothing absolutely new in the promise of a first contact. You have here a society in relative stasis, perhaps with the seeds of an internal dynamism. There comes an alien truly speaking, someone who fans an inner tension and causes it to come to head in a piece. And then you have a ‘conflict’ or ‘conceit’, or more humbly, a system of variations that construe a story.

But here arrives a prying eye looking for what is different, what if noticed might reach into our pasts and modify how we understand first contact. Perhaps in this piece, (see Morton, The Stranger), conditions have to be made for paranoia around a discovery. Perhaps in another one (see Changming, Speciating), conditions have to be made to understand first contact as memory of one’s origins. These are ruptures from the brute cosmological form of the first contact story; these stories are terraforming. They help us remember that there is always in speculative fiction the unfamiliar that structures the familiar, that the land we stand upon has been eroded in the past, that these mountains have been formed, that these ridges have been carved, that Earth itself has been terraformed so many times in the past and will be in the future, again and again. They force us to reckon with “words as riparian forms” (Mullins, Sublime Terrain) as a recent poet reminds us, and force us to immerse ourselves in the fluidity of the text and do some terraforming of our own reader selves, so our souls may receive this alien story. This is a world amenable to construction, and it is this openness that allows us to confront it in ways unforeseen. This is a novel world.

And here the gushing of words point to Bachelardian “spouts” of time. Nothing prepares us for a novel story. Its arrival is compulsive enough; it sweeps us up in the moment of its arrival, not before, not after. Like someone who has been thrown outside of established meaning-making, I am reduced to counting words, looking for repetitions, marking time until meaning surges back in.⁵

When a story terraforms, it asks a structuring question and presents itself to you ambivalently, without the immediate force of history compelling movement one way or another. “Is the story asking me to arrange things this way or that?” “What position am I being assigned?” The novel story interrupts a given flow of memory, a familiar orbit of the planets. “Is it suggesting that I read the poem with these concerns?” It makes the world a little more speculative, open and rife with possibilities. Of course, in another instant there will be other concerns, concerns also of truth and beauty, of myriad enumerations and closures and evaluations, but let us wait here a while. As the concerns proliferate—the nuts and bolts, the tension and its release, the style and syntax of a piece, the suggestions that open up when time decides to flow through us, what Bachelard calls the prosody of prose—we might want to mark that this instant has thrown up before any of that a disorienting effect (see Timss, Slowly Through the Middle Distance). Can we discuss if this renders us unhinged, forces us into the wind desperate for solid ground? Can we discuss if we find ourselves enveloped within a speculative world, but not merely as surveyors?

A story may be splendidly written, ticking all the boxes of classic fantasy or horror or science fiction, but does it offer us something new? Where I find it, there is Novelty, which has thickened this instant, has brought me into an agreement with life. I have discovered something new.

And like Ego, I defend it because I cannot resist being swept up by it. Our confrontation with speculative fiction is also our experience of time, our own sense of the past that we are writing with the authors we publish. When engaging with pieces submitted to State of Matter, I often respond with feedback that tells writers if we found their work novel enough. This is already a forked statement: I defend at once what we value and why we value it. We conduct a business in words: each word resonant with a meaning that has derived from our practical struggles, choices this way or that, settled debates, tentative positions, compromises, ideological commitments and non-negotiables. And we prefer that these words do not crystallise into clear, articulate criteria beyond vague categories; we prefer that we are thrown off-balance, that we are left groping for words, for positions to settle on, for another compromise to be struck. In each instant, we are looking to create conditions of our own deciphering: to terraform, in other words, where we choose to reside. We want through our stories to reveal ourselves to the world.

Sometimes I tell authors, “Your story did not invoke a new way of looking at this issue.” This implicates the author and me. It means that the author has caught me in a flow, where their story has created horizontal relations with a settled piece, as a trope, a cliché, something familiar. Many stories move you, but some move you horizontally by sheer logic or a wealth of experience, in a prosody, with the memory of stories that I have seen in my time before this one, structuring, anticipating this one. The author has not moved me vertically, that beckons me beyond the many different readings and identities that I have already folded within myself. It has not allowed me a break from where I stand. This here is a cosmic non-disjunction. I cannot defend such a piece since its concerns are of little risk to me—I lose precious little for a story whose core issues I have already settled within myself. To defend something, after all as Ego says, is to “truly risk something”, to look for that which is truly alternative, truly speculative.

There is too, in this opinion, a subjectivity of criteria. On the horizon, there are other relations that you may assume with speculative fiction. There are ways of structuring speculative fiction as means of categorising alternatives, perhaps as archiving them. Where pieces are juxtaposed or sequenced to create comparative visions. And these different arrangements inform what a speculative fiction magazine must do, how it should situate and conduct itself, what it should and should not say, with what inflection and what emphasis, what it should look for and what it should refract into the world. The particular arrangement that we have chosen requires its own defence, and perhaps it requires such a defence in its own time. But even as an assertion, it makes clear that this is what the world looks like from where we stand.

Our experience with the stories we read is touched by this concern. It is touched, first, by an expectation that we are capable of being moved by the stories we read, that text that is art that is life presents to us the possibility of our aesthetic vision. Such an expectation places an implicit demand on our authors too, that they will move us, help us narrate our own history. There is in this expectation a trepidation, a certain vulnerability that we must parcel out on all ends, and the politics of an editor-author relation that enters this fold. Second, it is touched by the peculiarities of who we are, the liminal bodies and identities that we continuously negotiate, and the stories of our private lives that unfolds with this project we have chosen for ourselves. The two questions we must settle then are those of selection: from within our monthly slush, those pieces that end up in our quarterly issues, and of truth of an experience that our peculiar definition of South Asian-ness permits us.

In due time, I will perhaps write about these.

Notes

1. Bachelard, G. (2013). Poetic instant and metaphysical instant. Intuition of the instant (E. Rizo-Patron, Trans.), 58–63. Northwestern University Press. (Original work published 1932).
2. Bird, B., & Pinkava, J. (2007). Ratatouille. Buena Vista Pictures.
3. Bachelard, G. (2014). The poetics of space (M. Jolas, Trans.). Penguin. (Original work published 1958). Here Bachelard introduces the idea of reverberations, the effects of a poem that we construct in the past.
4. Le Guin, U, K. (1987). Introduction. The left hand of darkness (50^th anniversary ed.). Penguin. (Originally published 1969). Le Guin argues that brave authors use words to write fiction to write truth, engaging perennially with what is.
5. Carl, P. (2018). Architecture, geometries, rhythm. Log, 43. 119–129. Anyone Corporation. Carl reads Corbusier and the ‘rhythms’ in his architecture, arguing that we return to the bare activity of marking time when dominant meaning-making (“Zeit without a particular Geist”) is unavailable.

John writes Your Man on Xenon V, and I am drawn to it not just because it tells us a tale of distance and loss, but because it reflects the human relationship with space. We make meaning and thus we make space—there is just that to beauty, little else.

Jonathon brings us A Joy Reclaimed, a story about cybernetic existence that brings humanity to those facing a dearth of it. There is a reclaimed humanity in the cherished traits of the characters that such existence completes, but by insisting on the human desire to persist after we are gone, the machine also becomes a memory, a history. The machine becomes fiction itself, containing traces of a cumulative humanity within itself, an idea which gives me pause and makes me wonder.

Chris’ piece, The Stranger, is about many things, but I love that it is about unidentified flying objects—those pesky things which everybody claims to have seen, no one pins down exactly and about which all accounts differ. The stranger too, turns out to be an unidentified flying object on all these counts, difficult to explain and relate with. Through this parallel, the story opens some windows to what happens when that which we consider peripheral is starkly introduced in our world, and the brush with paranoia that ensues.

Not to mention that our experiments with a prior conception of science fiction, of fantasy, of South Asian cultures were no less than what a close friend once called mosquito walk: wandering non-deliberately and changing course when one hits imaginary walls. Not to mention that medieval governors were not involved in linguistically fancy swashbucklin’, those adventures which characterized the essences of life and literature of which we emphatically want to be a part. These are but symptoms of a process that understands culture as closed, as therefore ready for objective inspection, of competition between sailor-writers to acquire cultural motifs that might appear most valuable to us, and of the immanent political relationship this assumes.

The alternative is a relationship of dialogue and literary practice.

When we say South Asian SFF, we have set ourselves a goal of not just showcasing a geography or its ‘pre-occupations’, or a miscarriage of our identity on the global platform; it is, rather, a culture set in a history of dialogue, of constant relationship with its world. In that sense, what is South Asian may be found in what are the white, arid landscapes of the poles, open to the sledge marks of wolfish adventurers. It may be found in dark trenches on the ocean floor, where water itself may lie still. And it may be found in stars and the deep, deep space of alien encounters. What is South Asian is at once global.

But what is South Asian is also at once localized. The world as a playground does not enter our doorsteps with the invitation of guests pined for. It sometimes tempts us in our dreams, sometimes barges in with guns and steel and sometimes just appears. South Asian science fiction and fantasy, then, is a process of engagement with these myriad ways so that the emergence of a consciousness can be studied in its dynamism, in the circumnavigating shadows our continent casts upon the world as the sun revolves around it.

The stories in this issue have been picked via this process of dialogue. The stories may be propelled by acute readers in ways they deem fit to contribute to this conversation. As an editor, my role is to initiate collaboration between people of a certain history orienting themselves along this process. It is to ask questions and not seek tailormade answers. It is to shout `All hands on deck’ and raise mine first. It is of immersion in the work of writers, of their imaginations, in the hopes of making it better, perhaps.

It is customary to introduce the stories in the issue. Emma Bider brings us Stargazer, a story whose focus on the `gaze’ I found compelling. Marina’s relationship with the star counterposes two kinds of seeing—one through the refractive lenses of the objective, scientific telescope and the other through seeing a subjective, supposedly irrational, dream. Which gaze is true, the story seems to ask: the telescope which does strange things with distance, or the dream which does strange things with physicality? Strange, perhaps, is what the story repeatedly offers us. Strange, perhaps, is what fixes our engagement.

Christopher Keene writes The Devil’s Luck, superficially a fast-paced, action-packed, edge-of-the-seat, deceptive action thriller. Deceptive because it is deep, because if you get carried away by the surface currents like I did, the result will be a sense of distress at the end. Graf is a hero, understood as the character to identify with, introduced only with the elements that Keene wants you to identify. This reduction is important, both for the ensuing subversion and its broader question: what makes us? The distress against a reduction, against the perils it poses for our answer, drives dialogue with the piece.

To be fair, neither story offers us South Asian SFF in a final form—that is a task spanning multiple issues, multiple efforts like ours. The claim of stories we include is not that they offer a definitive thrust to our search but that on our arrival at a milestone, we may trace our way back to touch these pieces again. They form a future history, an archive of textual connections that props us up, and in so doing helps us arrive closer to our intended conception.

This indicates that we need to modify our claim slightly. The stories are not merely selected by the process of dialogue but also because they incorporate our discriminating principle. Stories which open up rather than clamp down, stories which unsettle basic notions of being, of knowing and of moving about in the world, stories that help us reformulate and hence `reform’. It is in these bursts of estrangement that Suvin perhaps finds his definition of science fiction; it is these very bursts that we would like to pick from an ocean of texts.