New Delhi, Sept. 20 -- In his preface to the The IF Anthology of New Indian SFF, the first volume of a planned series of speculative fiction anthologies by Westland Books, editor Gautam Bhatia admits that while the process of putting this collection together was made as bias-free as possible with an open call for submissions and double-blind readings, his own leaning towards what he calls the "science fiction end of the SFFH (Science-fiction, Fantasy and Horror) spectrum" may have influenced the selection of stories.

Despite these protestations, the 11 stories in this volume are very different from one another, and most cannot be slotted neatly into any of the SFFH boxes, which is why, as Bhatia says, speculative fiction is a spectrum. G...