“She had imagined a field. But it’s a forest:” Speculative Fiction as an Imaginative Site for Oceanic Futures in Ecoceanic: Southern Flows 

Ecoceanic: Southern Flows, a 2023 anthology of science (and speculative) fictionpublished by Future Fiction in English and Italian, announces its organising principle right from the start with the obvious portmanteau in the title itself. Combining the words “ecology” and “oceanic” is indicative of its intents and purposes as stated in the editors’ introduction:imaginative responses to the crises of climate change, sea level rise and oceanic acidification from the vantage point(s) of the Southern Hemisphere—particularly from formerly colonised countries in Africa, South Asia, Australia, South America, etc.—to articulate visions of Oceanic Futurisms from the Global South (6). This focus on perspectives from locations that historically bear the least responsibility for anthropogenic climate change while having to face the brunt of its effects is reflected in the subtitle. The focus on oceans and flows also alerts the reader about a fluidity in the thematic and curatorial strategies that attempt to foreground dialogue among peoples and cultures affected by oceans, and changes therein, beyond rigid boundaries of ethnicity, nationality and even species. The poem that opens the book and the nine short storiesthat follow largely succeed in tackling the issues mentioned above through diverse lenses of culture, politics, epistemology, anthropocentrism, history and capitalism among others. While all of the works included herein cannot be argued to have been equally impactful, they do serve as important coordinates on the nautical map of scattered and inter-acting points of references to thinking about what might be the most pervasive issue facing us right now.

The editors, Tarun K. Saint and Franceso Verso, are neither new to the world of science(or genre) fiction nor to the task of anthology making and it shows in how they have been able to bring together an eclectic mix of authors and their distinct styles complimenting the thematic ambitions of the project. Born in Kenya and living in India since 1972, Saint has researched South Asian literatures—especially concerned with the Partition of 1947 and genre fiction—producing works such as Witnessing Partition: Memory, History, Fiction (2010) and The Hachette Book of Indian Detective Fiction Volumes I and II (2024). He also edited The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction Volume I and Volume II (2019, 2021). Francesco Verso is an award-winning Italian science fiction writer and translator (Urania, Premio Italia, Best Publisher and Best Author from European Science Fiction Society, etc.) who is passionate about finding underrepresented science fiction from non-Anglophonic parts of the world and introduce the global audiences to them via translation. He founded the cultural association Future Fiction along with Francesco Mantovani “to disseminate and promote an interdisciplinary approach to the idea of the future, using science fiction and speculation as bridges between today and tomorrow” (“Editorial Project”). His current focus seems to be on Solarpunk literature.

While Marco Medungo argues that Ecoceanic moves beyond the mainstream nation-based frameworks of categorising works of literature by adopting the ocean as a borderless site for meeting Others to foster dialogue and community (32), the entries within this anthology refuse to be limited by such a straightforward paradigm. Indeed, Deloughrey and Harootunian have showed how oceanic diasporic imagination often becomes an extension of the spatial ambition of maritime territorialism (quoted in Yamamura 31-32). Sam Beckbessinger’s short story “Undercurrency” brings this home with its interrogation on the corporate world’s attemptsof owning the oceans as resource-rich sites to be colonised. Yamamura goes on to argue how this “spatial ambition” might be the legacy of area studies on cultural studies that needs to be replaced by a “tidalectic” analysis that would argue for a deeper consideration of spatiotemporality without privileging one over the other (32-34). In this vein, the investment of “Undercurrency” in the past (through memories) and the future (through anxiety driven dreams) of the protagonist alongside her present is significant. The play with temporality continues across other stories too. In “The Water Runner” by Eugen Bacon, we see an alternate history of the world where the Arabs and the Sultans carried on slave trade across the Indian Ocean leading to the ocean literally drying up as a curse on humanity. Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s “I Had a Dream” operates on a mythical time frame in which supernatural entities, or deities, from the Hindu canon influence peoples’ actions by manipulating their dreams. Similarly, Thoraiya Dyer creates a story running on parallel time frames of normal human lifetime alongside millions of years in the lifetime of marine algal and bacterial lifeforms in “Shroud and the Moon.” Even Vandana Singh’s “The Word for World is Ocean” deals with the mysterious ways in which a planet’s geography is created across vast time-scales.

The fact that Singh’s novella is the closing piece of the anthology is significant not only because of the editors’ repeated invocation of her work in the introduction whereby her ideas literally frame the entire collection structurally (Medungo 35), but also because her workrepresents what Aaron Van Neste calls the “extrathalassic” (246). The extent of humaninteraction with the non-human can be seen to be culminating in this story where rudimentary, but direct, communication is practised between humans and the cetacean creatures of the planet Samudra. This blurring of boundaries between the non-humans is another recurring motif across the anthology. In “Shroud and the Moon”, we are presented with the “thoughts” and “conversations” of the marine lifeforms in an anthropomorphic manner. In Soham Guha’s “Mare Tranquillitatis”, we find a new sentient species of jellyfish that help defeat the antagonist’s plans and in “Undercurrency”, the protagonist feels herself to be a part of the ocean that she had only learnt to see either as threat or as resource. These alien encounters work as a transforming process that bridges the gap between the imagined ‘them’ of the ocean and the human-readers to create a radical ‘us.’ It is this surreality that is represented brilliantly in Vajra Chandrasekara’s “Half-Eaten Cities” where the rising sea levels inexplicably stay away from wealthy people and areas while submerging all other places. While this might look like a dark satire on inequality among different groups of people facing climate catastrophe, one also wonders if this repulsion might not be nature’s revulsion against those majorly responsible for its current state. “I Speak with a Thousand Voices” by Cesar Santivanez (translated from Spanish into English by Rachael Amoruso) also represents ancestral ways of communing with the “spirit world” and nature itselfamong the tribal peoples of the Amazon.

Kinship with the non-human world throws into relief an alternate way of life that impliesnot only gaining new forms of knowledge and power, but necessarily, also relinquishing some current forms of the same. Thus, pertinent questions about agency and intentionality arise out of these speculative exercises. Interestingly, terraforming or geoengineering is a recurring feature across stories in the anthology. While it is humans who engage in terraforming their environments and the non-humans are left to react to these changes, for better or for worse, in “Mare Tranquillitatis,” “Undercurrency,” “I Speak with a Thousand Voices,” and Chinaza Eziaghighala’s “Hope at World End,” it is, rather, the non-humans who actively terraform their environments in “The Water Runner,” “Shroud and the Moon,” and “The Word for World is Ocean.” There is almost a dialogue between these different works that exposes the hubris involved in Man’s knowledge project and his impulse for dominating and/or instrumentalising the world. Even within this dialogue, there are creative and productive dissonances: some suggest human endeavours, with some help from elsewhere, to be the solution (Guha, Eziaghighala) and are therefore primarily optimistic about technology as such; some see human actions as having irreversible consequences (Bacon), thereby rendering technology suspect; others try to find a negotiating middle ground (Chandrasekara, Beckbessinger), thus expressing cautious hope in technology; a few see non-humans as the protagonists who need human help in repelling the worst of anthropocentrism (Santivanez, Singh), therefore viewing technology as contextually useful; and still others find the non-human to exist and operate far beyond the frameworks of human understanding (Dyer), making questions about technology nearly obsolete. The works in Ecoceanic do not provide easy and generally applicable solutions despite the dialogic network and recurring themes across its works. As Kaiser Haq’s opening poem “The New Frontier” shows, sometimes the issues facing us are so vast and varied that it might feel surreal even considering their reality. In such situations, the least one can do is let out an ironic chuckle at the utter helplessness of the individual against global systems of extraction and domination. As a response to the planetary challenges ahead of us, Saint and Verso make proper use of the form of the “experimental anthology.” Their framing of the entries around concerns and questions rather than answers has allowed for a wealth of diverse visions regarding the future of oceans in productive tension with each other without flattening their contours through any forceful subsumption. The moods and sub-genres of the works also range from the satirical to science fiction, from the mythical to the dystopian, and the surreal to the nebulous speculative fiction; and while it is commendable how so many authors from different backgrounds have been brought together, one remains slightly disappointed in there being only one work being originally written in a language other than English, especially keeping in mind the amazing job Future Fiction has been doing in translating science fiction from various underrepresented languages.

Dealing with the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene, Ecoceanic, like any good work of literature, leaves us with a few more questions than we had begun with. While it is easy to classify this book as being, to a large extent at least, “posthumanist,” it is important to dwell on that a little more. Dyer’s “Shroud on the Moon” and Singh’s “The Word for World is Ocean” are, in my opinion, the most posthumanist stories in this collection (besides Santivanez’s “I Speak with a Thousand Voices” which is more spiritual than corporeal in its posthumanism) and yet, they both posit very different imaginations of agency in their storyworlds. While the humans on Samudra are capable of direct communication with the non-human beings, there is no such possibility in Dyer’s story. Singh’s non-humans save themselves and their friends alongside well-meaning humans whereas Dyer’s non-humans save themselves ignorant of human existence. Interestingly, both these acts of non-human and material agency require a “non-human” world to function. The question then becomes: in the Anthropocene moment of the entanglement of human agency with natural history, does a speculative world in which humans can ‘speak’ to their non-human Others not flatten the chaotic and disruptive nature of said entanglements by reducing even the extrathalassic Other to something knowable within human signification? In the final analysis, then, Ecoceanic stands out as a work that foregrounds memory and storytelling as forms of knowledge—of the self and the world—when faced with the recognition of the possibility of one’s own death, both as an individual and as a species, in both the present human time and deep ecological time.

Works Cited

• “Editorial Project.” Future Fiction, https://www.futurefiction.org/progetto-editoriale/?lang=en.
• Medungo, Marco. “Ecoceanic(a): Multilingualism, Oceanic Science Fiction, Decoloniality, and the Ambivalences of Anthology-Making.” Literature, Critique, and Empire Today, vol. 61, no. 1, 2026, pp. 30-48. https://doi.org/10.1177/30333962251414765.
• Saint, Tarun K., and, Francesco Verso, eds. Ecoceanic: Southern Flows. Associazione Future Fiction, 2023.
• Van Neste, Aaron. “Alien Oceans as Climate Salvation: Finding Hope in Kinship with the Deep Blue Unknown.” Literary Animal Studies and the Climate Crisis, edited by S. Borkfelt and M. Stephan, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, Springer Nature, 2022, pp. 245-266. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11020-7_12.
• Vermeulen, Pieter. “‘The Sea, Not the Ocean’: Anthropocene Fiction and the Memory of (Non)human Life.” Genre, vol. 50, no. 2, July 2017, pp. 181-200. https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-3890028.
• Yamamura, Tim. Science Fiction Futures and the Ocean as History: Literature, Diaspora, and the Pacific War. UC Santa Cruz, 2014. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3j87r1ck.