This special issue seeks to examine Indian science fiction and speculative fiction in general, as a critical archive where postcolonial enunciations of ‘space’ are actively produced, contested and reimagined through a variety of cultural texts. Our objective is to open a conversation about the overarching genre of Indian postcolonial Science Fiction and the way it interacts with the concept of ‘space’-- literal and/or cultural.

   Science Fiction, especially in the postcolonial Indian context, is a mutating domain, often overlapping with fantasy, dark-fantasy, horror, etc. One can discern, however, a constant production of narratives that treat cities, landscapes and hybrid terrains as the sites of conflict, negotiation, resistance, meaning-making and struggle where space is to be understood as produced through repeated performances shaped by contestation of the ongoing reproduction of colonial and imperial relations (Wolf 2000, Barnett 2006, Krishnan 2017). Indian SF and other genres of speculative fiction thus complicate– and partially transcend– this relationship between the West and its erstwhile colonies (Khanna 2009), stressing on the interaction between enduring pre-colonial non-literary cultural practices and their post-colonial cultural manifestations (‘Kalpavigyan’ and other subversions). This results in a generic hybridity, arising from the amalgamation of Western ‘hard SF’ with the multi-genre postcolonial texts, producing a distinctive narrative mode that negotiates technological futures through the lens of local histories, mythologies, and social hierarchies (Banerjee 2014, Chattopadhyay 2016, Mukherjee 2020). Indian PoCo SF and other speculative texts thus simultaneously engage with global scientific/technological/fantastic imaginaries and indigenous epistemologies, challenging universalist notions of progress while highlighting region-specific concerns such as caste, class, migration, and environmental change. By doing so, it reframes the Orient–Occident binary, showing how speculative worlds can serve as sites where historical legacies, cultural knowledge, and futuristic speculation coalesce to produce new spatial, social, and ethical imaginaries.

  Therefore, this special issue aims to contribute to the ongoing interactions regarding the reproduction of space, especially within the ambit of Indian science fiction and other speculative fiction genres such as, fantasy fiction, horror and dystopian fiction in literary and performative forms, including songs, films and games, etc. The spatial turn in this context moves beyond the dominance of the literature, opening up critical discussions that engage with a diverse range of non-canonical genres and alternative cultural modes (theatres and other performativities: songs, films, etc). By tracing these geographies across diverse formats, scholars can illuminate the ways in which Indian SF actively produces, contests, and reconfigures postcolonial space, offering insights into the intersections of technology, culture, and identity.

A few topics that the special issue may address (but are not limited to) are:

• Postcolonial urbanism in Indian SF (megacities, techno-utopias, dystopias)
• Mythic cartographies and reimagined geographies
• Environmental collapse, Anthropocene, and climate futures in Indian SF
• Dalit-futurism and subaltern spatial imaginaries
• Spatial borders, migration, and planetary belonging in speculative narratives
• The rural-urban continuum in Indian fantasy worlds
• Transmedia spatial narratives (film, comics, games, digital SF)
• The enunciation of any of the previous topics in horror/dark-fantasy texts in the Indian postcolonial context

Name of the special issue: Postcolonial Spaces in Indian Science Fiction.

 Journal: A reputed journal in cultural studies by the Taylor and Francis group, Q1, 5-year Impact Factor 1.8 (tentatively to be published by the end of 2026)

 Deadline for the abstract submission: November 20, 2025

 Abstract length: 300 words (excluding title and keywords), with a clear indication of the selected texts and aim

 Abstracts to be submitted: to Aditi Das (aditidas411@gmail.com)

 Issue editors: Dibyakusum Ray and Aditi Das

 Dibyakusum Ray is an Associate Professor in English at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Ropar, India. He works primarily in two branches—speculative fiction and urban studies. Among his other publications, the monograph Postcolonial Indian City-Literature: Policy, Politics and Evolution was published in 2022 by Routledge. He has edited the book, Cinema and the Indian National Emergency: Histories and Afterlives, has been published in 2025 by Bloomsbury.

 Aditi Das is a research scholar at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences in the Indian Institute of Technology Ropar, India. She primarily works on American speculative fiction and the multiple influences on the literary canon, using various texts.