ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Pakistani speculative narratives which evoke the Fantastika to indigenize this nonmimetic genre and foreground its social and cultural potential for young adults in Pakistan. By focusing on non-white futures as well as on tropes and motifs inspired by indigenous South Asian and Muslim cultures, this chapter discusses the ways in which imaginative work that emanates from Pakistan uniquely helps reimagine just and vibrant futures for Muslim readers. While proposing an alternative imaginative framework for Pakistani anglophone speculative fiction, this chapter engages with the tropes which have continued to surface repeatedly in Pakistani speculative writing: the first is the reappropriation of the trope of djinn and the second is the intertwining of mythical and high-tech future worlds. For example, Shazaf Fatima Haider’s A Firefly in the Dark (2018), through reflexive engagement with the idea of the djinn as Muslim superheroes, distinctly informed by Islamic and South Asian imagination, offers a transformational Muslim futuristic metaphor for imagining indigenous superheroes in provocative ways. Sami Shah’s short story “Reap”, Faraz Talat's novella Seventy Four, and Farah Naz Rishi’s I Hope You Get This Message, which all feature protagonists of Pakistani-Muslim origin, challenge the myth of Western intellectual and technological supremacy. In so doing, all these texts provide a way of speaking about the Muslim community that is shown to have upended global power dynamics in multiple ways.
