Science fiction has been employed as a vehicle to grapple with both existential moral dilemmas and the particular political questions of our times since the form was invented in the nineteenth century. Radhika Singh’s Earthly Playing Field is a quintessentially twenty-first-century entry into that tradition.
The novel follows Roma as she grows increasingly disillusioned with the rote repetitiveness of her life. Paying off a mortgage on a house in Queens, going to work every day for the same family-owned company her mother used to work for, and watching her friends’ families grow roots, Roma acknowledges on some level that she is languishing. Her entire family is back home in India, and it beckons to her. Both of her brothers are involved in farmers’ resistance movements, struggling toward freedom from American corporate interests. She feels guilty, complicit. That is, until her brother gives her a normal-looking plant with strict but secretive instructions for its planting. The plant manifests bioengineered technology they call the “cell,” a complex metaverse, home to entities who might just hold the key to their liberation.
This is not a novel for escapist readers. The real world exists in a major way here. Earthly Playing Fields comes from Common Notion Press’s “Nonaligned Series,” a series dedicated to “fiction, literary nonfiction, and poetry that explore the historical and ongoing legacies of anti-colonial politics, the evolving nature of imperialism, and the world-making freedom movements of our times.” As such, the novel’s speculative elements serve primarily as symbolic vehicles for exploring relationships to power. As such, sci-fi aficionados may find the speculative elements relatively underexplored. Some of the most interesting questions Earthly Playing Field raises are those that marry the mundane and the speculative, particularly those exploring the nature of surveillance and its use as a tool of structural and psychological colonialism.
For a book exploring such weighty and relevant subjects, the stakes throughout the narrative are often quite low. Some of the largest, most globally impactful issues are merely gestured towards without being explored deeply. There’s no question that Earthly Playing Field has much to say, but these messages were not as hard-hitting as they might have been through the eyes of a different point-of-view character.
Roma, in and of herself, is a compelling character. She is full of doubt and uncertainty, torn between the momentum of her life and the pull of a life both new and ancient. She is ambivalent and angry, and as a reader, I care what happens to her. Her position on the fringes of the novel’s main plot does have the deleterious effect of slackening the stakes. The farmers’ uprising in Amarpur directly impacts her family, but her day-to-day life remains largely unchanged. She could choose to look away, and the stakes evaporate completely. The larger, civilization-level stakes of a world controlled by corporate interests, while they impact Roma and by extension us all, are present but not grounded in Roma’s experience.
Many of the novel’s themes are expressed in dialectics. Roma’s inner monologue is a constant barrage of insecure processing conversations she’s having with other characters she sees as more morally pure. Indeed, nearly every character is purer in Roma’s estimation. Most of these ideal characters are involved in the resistance plot, but Roma’s friends, Maryam, Kassim, and Asya, seem to be present solely to externalize her thinking and provide dialectic contradiction through which to explore the questions presented. Dialogue is a primary vehicle for both exposition and theme throughout the novel. Characters often discuss prior events they already know about for the readers’ benefit. It’s a different reading experience from how dialogue in novels is typically presented and may pull a reader out if they’re not expecting it. The dialectical relationship between these characters works the least when it comes to Asya, the pre-teen daughter of Maryam and Kassim. It’s clear that Asya represents the moral purity and general hope of future generations, but the contents of her thoughts and words feel so abstracted from reality as to be believable.
One of the strongest themes of the book is the interplay between science and mysticism. Sikhism and Sufism are underrepresented in US literature broadly, and that deficit is even more glaring in the realm of genre fiction. The tension between modernity and capitalism and the wisdom of the arcane never fully resolves, and it is the largest question left lingering in readers’ minds after the book ends.
I found myself craving a clearer vision of what the alternative world order would look like. The horrors of the United States are largely gestured towards, but the struggle of the villagers in Amarpur is not significantly clearer. We understand that they are under the thumb of some multinational corporation, but the world that they are fighting for, specifically, seems ambiguous. There’s a vague sense that the citizens of the capitalist first world are too far gone to be saved, but it’s also unclear that Roma is any different from them beyond her adjacent positionality as sister.
Overall, Earthly Playing Field is a deeply political speculative novel exploring some of the most important questions of our time. Polemical and passionate, this book will appeal to socially-minded readers interested in surveillance and diaspora more than sci-fi buffs, but it is a worthy addition to the long tradition of socially-minded speculative fiction.
FICTION
Earthly Playing Field
By Radhika Singh
Common Notions
Published May 05, 2026
