Of Space and Slavery: Khizer Abbas's 'Ignition' presents an entertaining premise but doesn't really deliver

Cover Art - Winter 2022 Issue

I hurtle out of orbit, and burst into flames as soon as I hit the atmosphere. Cruelly, I am ripped from slumber.

One of the very interesting things about science fiction is that there’s a certain suspension of disbelief required in order to enjoy the story. Of course a lot of other genres already ask this of us. Fantasy asks us to believe in magic, supernatural asks us to believe in ghouls and ghosts, and even those with a closer connection to reality like mystery can really push the boundaries of what’s plausible and what’s not.

This story plays fast and loose with the idea, with a pretty entertaining premise that I can’t mention solely because it would be too big a spoiler to share. But that particular entertaining bit comes near the very end, which meant I was quite bored at the beginning, with the massive info-dumping and the lack of connection we feel with our protagonist, Hadi.

We had reached the station’s population capacity three generations ago, and since then we had exceeded it a few times over.

Hadi lives on Station Epimetheus, which encircles the moon and exists as a sort of subjugated mass of humans controlled by another station a little further away in space named Ananke. The lore goes that a mutiny led to Station Epimetheus being forced to exist on the dark side of the moon by those on Ananke, and now all those living on Epimetheus crunch numbers and clear debris from the space and mostly live a life of servitude and depression. Hadi is one of the masses, with no family and apparently very few friends, who likes clearing debris in the middle of the vast expanse of space because it gives him freedom from the overpopulated station and its inhabitants.

Honestly speaking, I have no idea what the author was trying to imply by giving the stations these names. A quick google search told me that these are references to Greek gods, Ananke as a personification of inevitability and compulsion and Epimetheus representing hindsight. The names were too specific to be random, but I was so sleepy and honestly so bored at the beginning that I just couldn’t be bothered to provide this story with the analysis the author clearly hoped a reader would indulge in. That boredom was further exacerbated by the hero’s apparent death, mentioned right at the beginning.

Screaming till the fire burns away the air in my lungs, I die never knowing if it was worth it.

Dead in the first paragraph is really not the right way to make anyone care about a story, unless the hero comes back from death, in which case this would be zombies in space, which could be a more interesting spin. Unfortunately, over here it was less resuscitated corpses and more an error in editing. Since the hero ((skip the paragraph to skip the spoiler) doesn’t actually die, a better sentence would have been ‘I prepare to die’, but of course at this point I have just embraced the fact that all the writers on this particular online compilation of stories are working with a complete paucity of actual editorial insight, so we will have to make do with the sub-par writing that we have.

On its own, the story does get interesting enough eventually, with a mysterious light in the darkness, a competent female mechanic, and authority figures who completely deny everything, leading our hero to be suspicious, as he rightly should be. Being subjugated, and fighting against that subjugation is a story I can always get behind, especially if our hero is alone in his struggles. Even though the ending really does push the boundaries of what I’m willing to believe can actually happen, it was still a pretty decent ending.

“Maybe… Maybe they’ve been lying to us about a lot of stuff, Ayesha. They’ve got us doing all their work for them, and in exchange they send us what supplies they can spare, and we’ve always just assumed that it’s the only way for either station to function.”

I think the author had the bare bones idea of a good story, and never really managed to fulfill its potential. Maybe if there was space to add more characters, or make us care more about Hadi. Maybe if there were more words to add depth to the circumstances, or a greater sense of involvement in each twist and turn. On the surface, I’m a fan of the idea of desi science fiction, purely because it’s so rare for me to read familiar names in fantastical settings, and this story tries its hardest to produce an interesting twist. Even forgiving the really weird spacing between paragraphs and lack of understanding of tenses in some scenes, the unpolished writing and the awkward phrasing in some places, there is still a little entertainment, so while I wouldn’t jump up and down to recommend this story, maybe this is an author to keep an eye on.

Ignition by Khizer Abbas was published in Issue 001 (Winter 2022) of Tasavvur, an online portal for South Asian writing. The remaining reviews for other Tasavvur stories by Pakistani authors can be found here.