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) ︎

“Must you pluck all the flowers?”

“Hey prabhu! Must you always startle me so?”

“Have you completely given up on sleep? Even the sun is yet to rise.”

“It’s the thieving neighbours. I must get them all before anyone is up.”

“The gods don’t need so many every day. I’m sure they’re tired of the same old flowers.”

“You and your tirade against my gods! For once, just stop wandering and go get some rest.”

You see, for the last twenty years or so, I have hardly slept a good wink—let alone rest—around the crack of dawn. As far back as I can stretch my unreliable memory, I cannot remember a day of our shared matrimonial life when the stubborn woman has not woken up at these ungodly hours. Even before the next-door rooster has cleared his throat, the entire house rings with a pandemonium of noises big and small—the ear-splitting creak of the rusty bathroom door, the rhythmic swoosh of the broom in the courtyard, the urgent jingle of her bangles attune with the dull thuds of her footsteps. Who can sleep around such a circus, not to mention the routine lowing of the neighbour’s cattle all night?

A lone owl’s hoot pierces through the thick, wintry silence of the dawn. The cool dew soothes my callouses as I struggle to put one foot in front of the other. They say wintertime makes old wounds come alive, reminding the body of the many shocks it has survived through the years. It has been a long walk though getting used to the distance is entirely another thing. I try blowing away some glistening cobwebs from the tagar tree—how beautifully it has grown! In full bloom, the small tree has morphed into a constellation of its own, its milky white flowers sparkling like tiny stars in the dark. I still remember the blazing summer afternoon when I had received my first salary; it was not much but so was the work of shuffling files in a government office all day. Proud as punch, lugging a gunny sack stacked with saplings of several flowering plants, I had walked home from the village bus stop. My mother and little sister, waiting by the verandah and probably expecting a freshly caught mirikali or a big ripe jackfruit, were unable to mask their disappointment.

In the soft blur of twilight, the peeled paint on the front wall resembles a furrowed bark of an old tree. I should have seen to its repair in time, when the place was yet to become a warehouse of unsightly cracks and clutter. I was fortunate to be left as the sole caretaker of this house since my younger siblings chose to prosper and grow old in the only big town in the district. They rarely visited the village. My mother, who refused to move, handed over the upkeep of the house to my wife after we got married. Reduced to a functional ruin now, the four close-packed rooms—the smallest doubles up as the kitchen and utility space—and a sizable backyard served us well over the years. With the little money I had saved up after a decade of employment, a small sitting room adjacent to the verandah and a pucca bathroom were added later.

My eyes rest on the big blob of seepage on the bedroom ceiling, giving it the appearance of a poorly drawn map by a child. Even the window curtains—the only remaining pair that match—have doubled in weight from gathering months of dust, the beige altered to a moldy brown. The steel almirah that once safekept the few valuables we owned, is now a dedicated shrine for junk of all kinds. Over the past few years, it has been piled with plastic boxes, paper cups, disposable spoons, wooden combs with missing teeth, utensils that have lost both their shape and purpose, and what have you. What started as a memorabilia collection in her younger days has ballooned into a ridiculous compulsion. I want to pull my hair and scream into the void, but I fear her sharp tongue.

“Tell me, what is so fancy about these plastic food trays? When will this habit stop?”

“Baah! Don’t you start now.” Almost hissing, she continues, “How do you keep wearing that same soiled shirt every day then?”

“How can you even bring me into this? As if I have an option.”

On the few occasions I secretly convinced Dhulia to dump it all by the banks of the Brahmani, her detective senses would sniff me out, and the entire matter ended up in a heated argument. One time she even went so far as threatening to jump into the river herself. Just like her gods, all that bric-a-brac too is sacrosanct; naturally, Dhulia is not allowed anywhere near them. His odd jobs, like weeding the vegetable patch and unclogging drains, are strictly restricted to the outer periphery of the house. My mother, who lived for less than a decade with us before she succumbed to a massive heat stroke, had taught her well. Despite their continuous bickering that would often drive me to the panchayat office for some quiet, they bonded well over pettiness and pakhala.

She sprinkles the remaining puja water on straggly clumps of yellow and pink tuberoses that have sprouted around the rim of the well. A few stubborn ones have broken through the cracks in the concrete, attracting small butterflies and dragonflies. In a fruitless attempt to draw her attention, I circle the drying well and pretend to gauge the level of the water. Following her—more out of habit than purpose—I hobble all the way to the verandah and try stretching my bad leg slowly against the broken stairs. The winter sun washes over me, rekindling the memory of a warm compress on my useless limb. As she approaches the sitting mat, her pet parrot Rupa throws a sudden tantrum, flapping its wings in a demonic frenzy. I won’t lie, it is the most nagging bird I’ve seen in my time though it is not hard to guess who it mimics. I tried to free it more than once but every time the rascal would fly its way back after teetering on the guava tree for a bit.

Every morning after she is done with her chores, a large part of which includes the daily puja, she would sit on the verandah floor with the newspaper spread under her nose. Ignoring the pressing concerns of the world, she would turn the pages in a haste and stop at the Daily Horoscope section. Quite a self-proclaimed expert of the zodiac, she has always stood firm on her hypothesis that people born under the Kanya rashi suffered the most trials and tribulations. Neither material prosperity nor good karma smiled upon her lot, as if the goddess Laxmi herself had some personal beef with them. She would often lament this astrological inheritance from her mother, grumbling over the generational wealth passed down to her.

Reaching for her customary mid-morning tea, which is saccharine to the point where ants circle the teacup in minutes, she clicks her tongue in dismay.

“Bad news?” I swat a fly circling above her head.

“If only you had been this attentive always! It’s a pity how men become so desperate in old age.”

She casts a sideways glance and continues running her index finger along the prediction. “My planets have not been in sync for some time. The full moon too is approaching in a day.”

“Hmm… Did your planets never warn you about me?”

I smirk; it always infuriates her.

A gust of cool wind carries a shower of tagar flowers across the verandah. While some land on her lap, caught in between the creases of her crumpled cotton saree, few rest on the bold newspaper headlines as if on a mission to block out the world’s ugliness. Disinterested in the floral intervention, she smooths away a few wisps of white hair from her eyes. With a singular focus, she surveys the crisp blue sky which does not carry a single trace of cloud. A pale, almost full moon waits patiently for its last sliver to complete yet another full circle. How I envy the moon, its ability to resurrect itself from the pit of darkness every month.

Years ago, her pantheon of the sun, moon and planets failed to foretell the fate of a dying man. They did little to caution her about a ravenous lump, the size of a lemon, gnashing through my left femur. I shudder recalling those days of wait and despair when, lying awake for hours, I could hear the inevitable shrinkage of my body, witness its gradual emaciation to the form of a skeletal child. During such sleepless nights, drenched in sweat and delirium, I’ve seen her throw up in the backyard. My poor brinjal plants! I know, it was a lot to stomach, the stench of my festering bedsores. The very thought still makes my insides churn, that brown, fishy discharge of pus melded with betadine.

It has been seven long winters to that fateful night. I remember there was a full moon that night as well. A thirsty blood moon, you see.

Dipu sits in front of the gate as the super-shop shuts down. Much like the plastic plant kept inside a plastic pot nearby. He gets up once, to leave. But where can he go? He sits back again.

The city has stitched one house after another, crossed one town after another, leapt past fields and rivers to reach Dipu’s childhood. His memories of the place have been unhanded by a multiplex project. Where shall he go? Home? Whose home? Which home?

Dipu keeps sitting. The super-shop will reopen at nine in the morning and close at eight thirty at night. It needs to be shut at that time according to the new laws of the government. Earlier it was better because it used to be almost eleven by the time the shop closed its business. Now he has a lot of free time for himself after work. Dipu doesn’t need such a lot of time. He will feel lighter if he can somehow sell all his free time. He is thinking of getting another job for the night. He can be a night guard. He doesn’t need money. Rather, he wants to get a job even if he needs to shell out money. He fishes out his phone from his pocket. He taps the buttons for a long time. He puts it on his ear and then doesn’t take it down.

Ma? Should I send it tomorrow? I will allow it to grow. Please have your medicines properly. Don’t be like Abba. No one grows rich saving money meant for medicines; people die this way. Abba has. Abba’s not alive, Ma. At least you stay. What? Fine, I’ll send over a sum. Ma, is my goat still there? You haven’t given away my ball, have you? Ma, I’ll come soon. You’ll wake up one day and see me standing right next to your forehead. I want to come back Ma, but I can’t for the life of me remember the way to our home. Wasn’t there a tender coconut tree right next to the tap? Now I spot a tender coconut tree in every house, but the area around the tap doesn’t match! Ma, have you hidden the tap somewhere? Or has Abba taken it with him? Ma…

He gets no answer from the other side.

Dipu puts the phone away from his ear. It has been two days since he charged it. He did put it to charge once today but forgot to switch it back on. He keeps clicking the buttons of the phone in his hand. Right now, even this seems like some sort of occupation to him. And while he clicks away, Dipu feels as though he is running on a board like that of the phone’s keypad. From zero to nine—no scope of going outside this limit. And within this space, life seems vast to him. But what he really needs to do is to reduce time to a dot and fling himself inside that dot. That dot that will have no time before or after it.

Dipu keeps sitting.

He gets up eventually. He gathers all his strength, but his legs suddenly feel numb. These days his memory freezes anytime, without a warning. He cannot recall a thing from just the day before. And when the people of this city think about their future, Dipu tries to build his past from a vacuum. He doesn’t remember if he ever had a house. His mother must have been there. There must have been a mother, since he had been birthed. And that is why he must have had a father. But what about a wife or sibling? Perhaps he has one, maybe he doesn’t. And when he thinks of a wife, the image of a child swims to his mind from the black hole that is his memory. And if he has a child, there must be a wife. Or does the black hole release the image of someone else’s child? Or that of his own childhood? Has everyone known to Dipu died? Among the millions and millions of people in this city, why doesn’t he know anyone? Is he himself alive? Do the dead have any memory? Dipu thinks that either he or others are dead. But this thought is not based on sound logic. Dipu now tries to hear some faraway sound. Some young bride is sobbing quietly. Her pillow is soaked. Dipu’s senses are suddenly so sharp that he can see everything clearly. His spirit seems to move out of his body and sit on that bed. A picture is kept on the mirror of the bamboo dressing table inside the room. It isn’t difficult for him to recognize it in the darkness. He opens his eyes and realizes that a house like this must exist somewhere in this world, a place where his photograph is kept. But where will he find that house? Why should he search for that house?

A dog climbs a few stairs and sits near his feet. One empty truck after another roars past him on the road in front. All the trucks carry materials for the construction of the new building. A night bird flies from the darkness nearby to the denser blackness yonder. A dream shifts from one side to the other in search of a sleeping person. Perhaps the people of this city do not sleep like Dipu, or maybe each of them has a pet dream, and a few commonplace dreams lie waiting for Dipu.

I had a pet dream once; I used to see it every day. Dipu says.

I am a pleasant dream. But no one wants good dreams now. This city has turned even dreams into entertainment. The dream says.

I can’t remember my dream anymore. Do dreams die like people? Dipu asks.

We can’t differentiate between alive and dead. We can only tell apart sleep from wakefulness.

And if one slips into eternal sleep? Or lies awake in perennial wakefulness?

The dream gets up without another word. It leaves in search of someone asleep. A person that has no dream of his own. This city has lakhs and lakhs of people who love dreaming. Dipu envies them.

The night doesn’t seem to move ahead. The buildings slowly dim one by one. Dipu feels like walking through the entire city today. And while walking, he wants to enter an unfamiliar house. Perhaps a woman will say—wash your hands and face and come for dinner. And after washing his hands, with great intimacy, Dipu will wipe his hands on the edge of her saree. And as if she were his own, she will not stop any of his advances. Dipu wants to embrace her once. He hasn’t hugged a woman in so long. And sitting for his dinner at the neat and organized table, he will taste the food made by someone very familiar. He will be a little absent-minded in trying to recall whose hands cooked such food. The woman will place her hands on his shoulders then. And he will break down trying to wonder if anyone had ever placed her hands on his shoulders that affectionately.

Dipu recalls someone. While walking the lanes of his neighborhood, he tries to remember the name. A person’s existence is incomplete without a name. While searching for that name, Dipu walks quite a distance. He decides to enter a house. He spots an old, two-floor house on the street that hasn’t crumbled yet because it is waiting to be demolished any day soon. Before he can press the calling bell, someone opens the door from inside. Dipu puts one of his feet inside.

Keep your shoes outside, I just swept the floor. The woman says.

She probably opened the door. Dipu keeps his shoes and looks at the wall, wondering what to do next. A lizard looks at him. He stares back at the lizard squarely in its eyes. He slowly builds the courage to look at the woman’s eyes.

What happened? Wash your hands and come for dinner.

Dipu looks around and locates the washbasin. He washes his hands for a long time. He moves forward to wipe his hands. The woman is not wearing a saree, she is clad in a salwar-kameez. She doesn’t have a dupatta on her. There is space for only one person at that small dining table, the rest of it is cluttered with objects. Dipu pulls the chair and sits. At the table there is a plate of rice along with two vegetable sides. When he looks closely a cockroach moves down from one of the containers, climbs his arm and enters his shirt. He sifts through the rice on the plate. The potato mash is watery; the young banana curry has dried up. While eating, he tries to recall something. No, he cannot remember. He cannot recollect the thought he had when he entered that house. And he cannot eat fast, preoccupied with thoughts about what to do after dinner.

Go to the room after you’re done eating. I’m leaving for the hotel. Napa Suppository is kept there. Give her the medicine if the fever increases. She will have to be admitted in the morning. Did you get money anywhere? Saying this, the woman applies a thick coat of lipstick and drapes a black dupatta on the salwar-kameez she is wearing.

Dipu realizes that he has entered the wrong house. He gets up and brushes his clothes. The cockroach falls to the floor and scurries away inside the room. Dipu cautiously follows suit. A child is lying there, around seven or eight years old. The bed looks really old. Dipu sits gingerly beside the girl. She seems to be shivering with fever. He should get out of here before he is stuck in some major problem. There are many other houses in this city, lakhs and lakhs of skyscrapers have hidden the sky and the trucks hover all through the city carrying materials for another lakh of such buildings. Dipu regrets entering the wrong house, his life suddenly seems unbearable to him, if at all he is alive… He will leave right now. There is no one to stop him now. He gets up. He is startled, looking at the picture on the bamboo dressing table on the wall next to him.

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.

I know someone who’s bought an actual axe and a lightsaber
just in case the virus mutates to T-form and we wake up to zombie neighbours.
We already know the only way to handle a zombie, don’t we?
Off with the head!

Conjurors? Premonitors? Seers? Or cautionaries?
Travellers.
I wonder which time dimension these storytellers came from.

As a child, I believed walls to be cross-dimensional gateways.
I was scared of putting my feet on the floor, ‘cause my brother always told me,
Hands from under the bed will grab little Anna’s legs.
Driven wild by imagination, even Dante’s banished souls reached out to pull me into the hellhole through the pages.
I noticed that hell too resides in the underworld dimension.
This constant thinking is my problem.

There’s an atmospheric change.
It’s got to be this global warming everyone talks about,
’cause all that I see appears to be in darker shades.
Flawless. Like vogue air-brushing.
Everything smells musty too like there’s a mold infestation,
but really there isn’t any. Really, I’ve looked.
It’s cold mostly so I never forget to put my cerulean sweater on.

These walls have looked no different since my 13th birthday but they feel much taller.
Barricading or thwarting, I can’t decide.
It’s mostly a low-frequency rumble here: a bit too quiet at times.
Better than the beeping ambulances last year I suppose.

Where are my parents?
All I can recall is watching my brother move out a while ago, without saying goodbye.
He stopped acknowledging my presence since that day.

But it’s the new faces in this house that bother me.
They arrive in batches as if this were a Bed n’ Breakfast
but leave soon after I nudge them to stop sleeping in my bed.

Yesterday that boy in basketball shorts turned as pale as his t-shirt when I showed him the used butter knife he had left on the breakfast slab the previous night.
Just plain old lack of chivalry.

I am not a whiner to not share my space or time with anyone,
but I don’t like spectators while I’m naked.
Why do they barge in unannounced while I’m in the middle of my four-time daily bathing routine to get this festering black muck off my body?
An allergy. That’s my diagnosis,
‘cause I can only get a doctor sprinting out of the door every time I talk about it.

But I think it’s my strength that seems to be deteriorating each day.
I can’t eat anything ‘cause I’m not hungry at all.
Come to think of it, it’s actually my memory that seems to have faded since the day my parents left to see the doctor after they caught the flu.

Aunt April called that day and told me that Nonna couldn’t make it through the flu.
I wonder why she would lie to me blatantly, ‘cause Nonna is the only one who visits me every now and then, although she’s too old you know.
Can’t see anything, doesn’t say anything.

My brother too left coughing blood that day.
Said he’d be back after consulting the doctor.

He did tell me not to look under the bed and I remember trying my best not to
and I don’t really remember why,
but I think I did.