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The Speculative Route explores speculative traditions and science fictional modes across South and Southwest Asia and North Africa (SSWANA), examining their historical connections, inter and intra-regional entanglements, overlaps, and differences.
List of contents
List of contributorsSeries Editors' PrefaceIntroduction: "The Spice Must Flow"
Merve Tabur and Sami Ahmad Khan
I Critical essays
I.I Future Pasts
1 Suparno Banerjee, "Science Fictionalizing the Epic: Retelling the Ramayana in the Age of Science"
2 Engin K¿l¿ç, "Khent (The Fool): An Armenian Utopian Vision Compared to Ottoman-Turkish Utopias"
3 Ada Barbaro, "Other Places, Upside-down Places: Narrating the Nakba (1948) from the Future, Palestine Looks to the Future to Contest the Present"
I.II Urban Futures
4 Nat Muller, "Maha Maamoun's 2026: Cracks in the Future of the Global City"
5 Ezgi Hamzaçebi, "Istanbul's Speculative Futures: Transformation of the City and the Sense of Citizenship"
6 Saba Pirzadeh, "Environmental Futurities and Solastalgia in Global Speculative Fiction"
I.III Rethinking Gendered Presents
7 Tehmina Pirzada, "Beyond Capes and Khans: Social Retrofuturism in Select Female Superhero Narratives"
8 Zahra Jannessari Ladani, "Utopian Mentalities and the Dystopian Future in Zoha Kazemi's Humanoid"
9 Sabiha Huq, "Bangla Science Fiction: A Gendered Landscape"
II THINK PIECES
10 Sonia Sulaiman, "The Reality and the Dream: The Palestinian Speculative"
11 Funda Özlem ¿eran, "The Tech-Ignorant's Guide to Science Fiction"
12 Ahmed Naji, "On Egyptian SFF"
13 Zoha Kazemi, "Keeping it Close to Home: A Think-piece about the New Iranian Speculative Fiction Movement"
14 Manjula Padmanabhan, "Space, Time and Otherness"
15 Navin Weeraratne, "Writing Sri Lankan Science Fiction"
16 Samit Basu, "On Indian SFF"
17 Usman T. Malik, "An Ode to The Music in Our Bone Marrow: Revisiting Pakistani and South Asian Science Fiction"
18 Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, "Infinite Games in Someone Else's Sandbox"
19 Priya Sarukkai Chabria, "The Same Life in My Blood"
20 Saad Z. Hossain, "South Asian World Building in Science Fiction and Fantasy"
21 A Roundtable of SSWANA Writers: The Speculative South Index
About the author
Merve Tabur is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Utrecht University, the Netherlands and a Researcher at CoFutures.
Sami Ahmad Khan is a Writer, Academic, and Documentary Producer. He teaches at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India.
