Contemporary Pakistani Speculative Fiction and the Global Imaginary: Democratising Human Futures. Shazia Sadaf and Aroosa Kanwal (New York, Abingdon: Routledge, 2024)

Shazia Sadaf and Aroosa Kanwal’s recently published book-length study of “emergent Pakistani speculative fiction in English” contains five carefully woven chapters on highly contemporary novels and short fiction (published in the main between 2015–2022), which draw on a fascinating range of largely new critical scholarship in order to probe how this writing “speak[s] to the world” and why it is valuable to listen, “as we speculate about humanity’s future in perhaps the most precarious period of our existence on the planet” (p. 1). There is a definite decolonial intention here. The scholarship of Matthew Wolf-Meyer is invoked from the outset to underscore the “importance of democratizing speculation about the future” and adopting a “sceptical” approach – aided by contemporary Pakistani fiction – towards “existing conceptions of the world […] developed [and] reinforced by the global North” (p. 2).