A CoFuturist Reading of Post-Apocalyptic Dhaka in Saad Hossain’s “CyberMage” - Anna Juhi John

Saad Hossain is a speculative fiction writer from Bangladesh who effectively fuses science fiction and fantasy, chiefly rooted in the local folklore and myths, to create a post-apocalyptic world where anthropogenic activities have led humans to survive in small clusters or cities in environs made habitable by climate control AIs. These AIs interact with the bacteria-like nanotech that the occupants of the ecosystem produce through their biological body to make the ecosystem sustainable. Cities controlled by corporations that could seek enough populations survived. Hossain’s futuristic world appears in his numerous works such as “Bring Your Own Spoon” and Djinn City. CyberMage, the sequel to Djinn City, explores the effect that the corporate-controlled environment can have on its residents especially as many seek refuge in the cyberspace called Virtuality. With the Djinns making a reappearance from the first book the order of (trans)human existence is further plunged into question. This paper attempts to read CyberMage as a CoFuturist (Chattopadhyay) rendering of a post-apocalyptic city where the narrative science fiction or rather speculative fiction is told from the margins of the world as we occupy today and as the one in which the protagonists are situated in.