“Between Worlds: The IF Anthology of New Indian SFF, Vol 1” by Gautam Bhatia
I read this anthology. I interviewed Gautam Bhatia for TOI Bookmark.
Here is a snippet from the conversation:
I, of course, have been a long-time writer, editor, and reviewer of science fiction and more broadly speculative fiction which includes fantasy, horror, slipstream and magical realism. One thing you often hear from people, or two things you often hear from people when you talk about Indian SFF is well first, “What is that?” and then secondly, “Isn’t SFF a Western genre that is written in the West?”In India, of course, we have mythology but SFF is not homegrown here. Both those observations are quite off the mark. Because as far back at the late nineteenth century, Jagdish Chandra Bose, was famous as a scientist but was writing a SF story about a bottle of hair oil that stops a typhoon in its tracks and Rokeya Shekhawat Hossain is writing The Sultana’s Dream in English. I could go on but basically SFF has a very homegrown history.
Much has to be said about this initiative particualrly about the careful selection of stories via an open submission and then a double-blind peer review. Yet I cannot wrap my head around the fact that none of the authors are mentioned in the table of contents nor does a bio blurb exist for them in the book! How can that be?!
Gautam Bhatia is a writer, reviewer and editor based in New Delhi, India. He is the author of The Sentence, and the science fiction duology, The Wall and The Horizon, and the coordinating editor of the science fiction magazine Strange Horizons. In his other life, he is a constitutional lawyer and public commentator on civil and constitutional rights in India.
25 Sept 2025
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