Stronger than Fiction

I inherited a love of reading from my parents, and a drought of books I loved reading from our town’s poorly stocked bookshops. My father’s study, full of British, Irish, and Indian poetry, Russian tomes, and volume upon volume of literary criticism (for years I was convinced my father must be really into criticising people), was formidable. So was Maa’s preference for Premchand, Dinkar, Renu, and such Hindi stalwarts. 

Among the first books that I owned were Ruskin Bond’s stories, abridged editions of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and a collection of Greek myths for children. These books had the ‘Also from the Publisher’ pages; I remember underlining book titles that started with ‘The Adventures of’, or sounded like they would be one hell of a ride. 

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes 

The Adventures of Pinocchio

Around the World in Eighty Days

Journey to the Centre of the Earth 

The Time Machine 

The Invisible Man 

The Hound of the Baskervilles  

King Solomon’s Mines 

Treasure Island

My father was tasked with acquiring these and more titles, some of which he would find in Patna and Banaras. While at a bookstore on the Banaras Hindu University campus, Papa suggested I read To Kill a Mockingbird. He said, ‘You always read what you want to. Pick one I tell you today.’ 

I picked The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Growing up, life was all about adventures, detectives, superheroes, dragons, and time machines. I put my hand in a spider’s web once, hoping a bite or two would surely make me Spider-Man. Lessons in reality came later. With my experience of life outside my hometown. With my picking up Harper Lee, Dostoevsky, Thomas Hardy, and Dharamvir Bharati from my parents’ bookshelves. Over the next two decades, I believed I was ‘growing’ as a reader, helping myself to the finest works of realism, educating myself on what grown-ups would call ‘the human condition’.

I came to know there’s this genre called ‘speculative fiction’ only a few years ago. I will not give a primer on the term here. Only that from what I gather, it is an umbrella term for the kind of stories kids like me were raised on—tales of fantasy and adventure, alternate histories, utopias and dystopias, science fiction, and such unreal imaginings. 

I have realised lately that somewhere down the line I had made my reading list too niché, too refined, and, I’m afraid, too pompous. The kid who once handed over weeks’ worth of his pocket money to a friend to bring him the then-elusive seventh Harry Potter book from the city was accused recently, by another friend, of reading only Nobel and Booker-winning authors. 

But I am not alone in having sidelined a beloved genre for a good many years. Readers like me abound. Many publications, too, state it in their guidelines that they do not consider ‘genre fiction’.

As if anything could be more real than science. 

As if yesterday’s fantasy could not be tomorrow’s reality. 

When I was asked to write the foreword to this anthology, I protested instinctively, admitting I was the worst man for the job, for I had read little speculative fiction in years. But Tejaswinee was adamant. As are her stories. 

I had no choice but to give in to one of my favourite contemporary speculative storytellers. 

Two more of my favourite writers working today are in this volume. I rank Shih-Li Kow’s The Sum of Our Follies alongside One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Master and Margarita, and The Legends of Khasak among my all-time-favourite magic-realist reads. And I cannot begin to count how many forms, styles and genres Amit Majmudar is a master at. One of his latest releases, The Later Adventures of Hanuman, has for its premise the mother of all speculative beliefs. (And the book has ‘The Adventures of’ in its title!) 

I was naturally inclined to know what Tejaswinee, Shih-Li, and Amit would be serving in this collection. And I was generously rewarded, with much more than these three. 

I fell in love with literature when Ruskin Bond saw a face in the dark with no nose, mouth, eyes, and ears. When Jayant Narlikar had a historian hit by a truck and wake up in a world where history was stranger than fiction. When Satyajit Ray made a man travel through time and bodies to produce a scathing critique of colonialism. When Jules Verne sent brave, mad men around the world and into the earth’s centre. When Kurt Busiek wrote a man haunted by visions of a woman who was not, and yet was, real. When Kurt Vonnegut let his fictionalised self come unstuck in time. When J.K. Rowling promised a world more magical if only you could find the platform called Nine and Three-Quarters. When Gabriel García Márquez celebrated the handsomest drowned man in the world washed ashore an irrelevant island. And when Salman Rushdie, at the stroke of that fateful Indian midnight, sired children bonded by singular powers. 

But what of this book? What makes it worth your time? 

I suppose it should be enough to say that these stories have me sold, again, on the genre where anything can happen, and everything invariably does. 

But it takes more than that to lure a reader. 

Well then, here’s more incentive. 

In this volume you will encounter creation myths, bureaucratic adventures in the afterlife, post-mortem revenge dramas, almighty computer programs, post-apocalyptic dystopias, evil lurking in the ordinary, dreams of the dead, and more. 

Still not enough? 

Fine. 

Speculative fiction is generally woven around premises too unreal for the real world. But not all speculative fiction is great. Some stories introduce a solid idea and leave it at that. The stories in this collection push peculiar premises and see them through. These stories take me back to the reasons I became a reader in the first place. Back to the bare bones of reading. 

And I hope they do the same for you. 

Ankit Raj Ojha’s writings have appeared in Poetry Wales, Poetry Scotland, The Honest Ulsterman, Indian Literature, Outlook, Routledge, Johns Hopkins University Press, and elsewhere. A PhD from IIT Roorkee, he is an assistant professor of English with DHE, Haryana, and has worked for half a decade as a software engineer with Infosys. Ankit edits The Hooghly Review and has also edited THE BARE BONES BOOK OF HUMOUR (Bare Bones, 2026).