Lounge
Loka and The Spice Gate: Two spec-fic novels about the search for home
Summary
Two recent works of speculative fiction explore the idea of finding home—here on Earth and away from it
At a time when boundaries are more pervasive than ever in the world we live in, they have permeated fiction as well—especially speculative fiction, where writers get to play around with them and with the idea of home: who it belongs to, who inhabited it first, who has the right to seek it.
In Loka, US-based writer S.B. Divya’s second book in a series set in the far-future “alloy era" of humanity, a young girl must find out where she belongs and where her true home is. She was chosen, even before her birth, to live on the planet Meru, the setting of the first book in the series. Yet, Akshaya yearns for Earth—she has never set foot on it, but it feels something like home to her.
Akshaya’s mother is human. Her other parent, her “maker", is a genderless “alloy", a member of a post-human race created through genetic design. In this world, alloys make the rules and humans have to live harmoniously with them. Ambition and violence are frowned upon for having brought the Earth to the brink of destruction centuries ago through greed and exploitation. Alloys embody a sort of universal consciousness; think of them as gods from Hindu or Greek myth who can create “incarns" or human-like avatars of themselves.
Akshaya gets to spend a few months on Earth before moving permanently to Meru, which has a specific kind of atmosphere that she is genetically primed to inhabit. But even half-alloy teenagers a thousand years from now do behave like teenagers, apparently, because she rebels and negotiates with her parents to let her do one tiny thing before she moves to Meru with them: circumnavigate the Earth to complete the Anthro Challenge with her friend Somya. The rules of the challenge involve using only human-era technology, taking no help from alloys or their vastly superior tech, even though parts of their route would take them to the Wild West of this world, areas called the Out of Bounds that are not governed by the alloys. Throw in a documentary being filmed to record this journey in real-time and the stage is set for a first-class adventure story as Akshaya and Somya navigate this terrain, unknown to them but more familiar to the reader than the book’s setting, without the help of technology they are used to—like humans trying to cross the Sahara without GPS. In the process, Akshaya must also figure out what “home" means to her.
A similar wistfulness for home also pervades a very different work of speculative fiction, Bengaluru-based author Prashanth Srivatsa’s debut The Spice Gate, an epic fantasy set in a world where spices are the essential commodity and currency.
The world of The Spice Gate is divided into eight kingdoms, and only those belonging to the “gatecaste", born with a “spicemark", can pass through the spice-gates.This, however, does not give them special privileges—in fact, they are the lowest of the low; the drudges who must be kept in check lest they use the power of spices to better their lives. Amir, the biryani-loving protagonist, is a young boy belonging to the gatecaste who dreams of escaping the hellish landscape of Raluha, where he lives with his brother and mother, and finding a new home for himself and his family.
The world-building is intense here as well, though somewhat more accessible to readers of fantasy. Srivatsa’s highly visual writing, along with a certain resonance one finds with things read and watched, makes it easier to imagine his setting than Loka. Complex and colourful, The Spice Gate is filled with intrigue and deception, half-buried secrets, and a quest for home that seems very familiar to anyone watching the current destruction of a fractured part of the world today over the right to call it home.
In both novels, imaginary worlds mirror our own and offer critique and solace. The Spice Gate takes a commodity that has been the instrument of some of the worst episodes of colonisation, extraction and oppression in modern history and takes it to the logical end. On the other hand, Loka, in making humans subservient to a post-human super-race that justly withholds from us the right to venture into new frontiers, offers humanity a possible solution to its own extractive instincts.
