Abstract:

This survey paper examines the evolving trends in contemporary Pakistani speculative fiction which brings together tropes and motifs from imaginative worlds of local folklores as well as Islamic mythical worlds of South Asian civilization. We particularly discuss the ways in which, by adapting extra-terrestrial life forms, mythological tropes and themes from the Urdu popular genre tradition, Pakistani anglophone writers bring to the fore the greater potential of the speculative genre in responding to more contemporary problems associated with patriarchy, fundamentalism, gender issues, neo-colonialism, marginalization, racism, war technology and anxieties associated with emergent forms of nationalism. This paper specifically engages with Pakistani anglophone speculative fiction which is explicitly in conversation with Urdu science fiction and fantasy tradition, and in so doing these works create new worlds of indigenous cultures as vibrant and resistant yet firmly fixed in both myth and alternate futures. Our survey of a long-standing fascination of Pakistani anglophone writers with some local tropes that refigure in their speculative fiction shows how these non-western speculative paradigms can serve to re-centre and revive Pakistani speculative tradition in the global popular culture.

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