Radhika Singh’s Earthly Playing Field is a novel that is firmly rooted in our erupting, unfolding present moment. Set in 2024, the story centers on Roma, a woman living in Queens, as she grapples with issues such as the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the tentacular reach of surveillance technology. Across the world, in Amarpur, India, Roma’s brothers are involved in farmers’ resistance movements against both the Hindutva state and American multinational corporations. What bonds these worlds is a bioengineered plant called the cell, which facilitates communication across time and space and offers a key vector for resistance. The central arc of the novel concerns Roma’s search for purpose and connection through conversations with people (and magical beings) about leftist political theory, anti-colonial history, and Sufi philosophy. Woven through this arc, too, is an unconventional queer love story and the introduction of extraterrestrial beings who Roma dubs the djinn.

The novel entices readers with its rich premise, which threads meaningful intersections between ongoing and historical struggles. There is a lot to learn from its pages, which cite thinkers like V. I. Lenin, Guru Gobind Singh, and Assata Shakur. Much of the novel’s narrative content takes place in dialogues between Roma and others, and quotations from important works are sometimes stated by characters from memory. But the density and frequency of these dialogues stymies narrative momentum and replaces dramatization with explanation. Events in the novel—from the farmers’ uprising in India to Roma’s past relationships—happen off the page and are described only in their reflections, which flattens their significance and creates a sense of lag.

Singh has clear and admirable political commitments as a writer, and can be placed squarely within a lineage of leftist speculative fiction. As Samuel Delany once posited, speculative fiction is a “tool to think about the present,” and the form has long served as a vehicle for leftist political thought, whether as allegory or social extrapolation. Frankly, I am a fan of ardently leftist fiction, books that loudly espouse their commitments and present models for thinking about how the hell we got here and how we can possibly get out. I share a position recently articulated by Margaret Killjoy, that stories that aim to teach you something, and do so transparently, can be pretty damn good even if they’re out of fashion.

Reading Earthly Playing Field, however, I wondered about the utility of both fiction and the speculative mode to elaborate its politics.

The central process in this novel appears to be ideological and discursive, developed through the long stretches of dialogue between Roma and other characters. I was particularly taken by the ways in which Roma embodies a contradiction between theory and practice, at times turning to books as a refuge, at times expressing frustration at the limitation of enshrined knowledge to meet on-the-ground struggle. Still, once I realized that the novel’s main transition would be within Roma’s interiority, I found myself wanting to be more connected with her development as a politicized thinker. When we encounter Roma, she is already ingrained in her studies of Islamic history and political theory. As readers we are granted some sense of Roma’s ideological transformation in the past, but we never experience that with her ourselves. Because this novel is so invested in citation and argument, this means that the narrative expectations it seeds are not always given room to develop.

For example, a recurring consequence of Roma’s studies are her continued assertions that life in her world, named in the novel as Empire, is not “real life,” and that movements across the Global South have already deepened Empire’s many fault lines. This “real life” proposition is situated in an early conversation between Roma and her young friend Asya. I imagined that, as we observed Roma growing and changing through the events of the novel, we would encounter a shift in this perspective. Perhaps Roma would discover that, even within the geopolitical landscape of Empire, there were forms of meaningful resistance and community beyond her own: Land Back, abolition of police and prisons, anti-border activism. Instead, the ending of the novel, in which Roma goes to Amarpur and further immerses herself in reading and meditation, seems only to reiterate, rather than resolve, this early expectation. The novel doesn’t generate enough friction between Roma’s ideas and the world. It is conceivable for a character to hold the same worldview at the beginning and end of a novel, but this is most satisfying for a reader when that worldview has been tested, pressured, complicated, or transformed by experience.

Similarly, the plant-based cell network, the speculative premise of the novel, holds so much potential for narrative complexity. Developed by Roma’s revolutionary brother Ranbir, the cell is an element of science fantasy in this novel, a convergence of technology and magic which blurs the boundaries of both. As an Earth-based mechanism for cross-temporal organizing, the cell is a beautiful bridge between the novel’s key themes of devotional embodiment and political praxis. Additionally, I appreciated that the djinn were able to share with Roma that the cell technology is co-opted by Empire in the future—a meaningful turn away from pure techno-optimism or hopepunk.

Still, I wondered about the cell’s own animacy, especially when a central question within the text appears to be Roma’s relationships with embodiment and the land around her. The text barely dwells on the cell itself before leaping into the strange existence of the djinn and their ability to utilize the plant network to disrupt the financial technology of Empire. I was eager for the cell to be a living entanglement of politics, embodiment, ecology, history, and futurity. Instead, the cell often functions as a communications technology. Its potential to offer sensuous, not literal, meaning is underexamined.

The Marxist critic Georg Lukács wrote in his 1936 essay “Narrate or Describe?” that “narration establishes proportions, description merely levels.” There is a necessary urgency to the topics in Earthly Playing Field, but the novel never reaches an emotional threshold because much of the heart-racing action happens off the page. Description and explanation are favored over action and uncertainty; the result sets up fascinating questions only to answer them immediately. The novel doesn't allow meaning to remain unstable enough for the reader to participate in producing it.

For example, while I would be remiss not to mention Roma’s longing for the Iranian revolutionary Leila, who she meets via cell projection, I found myself engaging with even this aspect of the novel as another instance in which possibility is contemplated rather than lived. Leila is bright and elusive, a source of lunation in Roma’s disillusionment. After a heady conversation, Roma finds herself pining for Leila, whose commitments to the revolution detract her from engaging in individual pursuits of romance. This treatment draws on a Sufi poetics of longing, in which absence itself becomes generative.

But what I returned to in this novel, and found most affecting, was the quiet story of Roma, who has committed herself to ideas and fallen in love with the archive. Roma’s relationship with thinking might be the central, aching romance in Earthly Playing Field: The more that she turns towards histories, poems, and theories to understand herself, the more she realizes the limitations of thought alone. It is heartbreaking, truly, that interpreting the world cannot save us from having to live within it. Within this subtle and deeply human thread, I found myself in Roma.