Description

In the twenty-fourth century, India is a superpower, its economy built on the reproductive labour of women. Liberated from their biological clocks through cryopreservation, the privileged prosper, while those banished under the Child Licence Act survive through commercial surrogacy. When a fifteen-year-old girl from this marginalised world sets out to uncover the truth about her mother’s banishment and her own identity, she is drawn into the hidden workings of a state far more brutal than it appears. Set in a technologically advanced Indian future, this dystopian science fiction novel explores the ramifications of authoritarianism, class divides, caste discrimination, and the commercialisation of women’s reproductive labour. Through her journey, the story critiques a future already taking shape — a world where independence of thought and human dignity is stifled by hyper-capitalist and authoritarian forces.

At once politically incisive and profoundly humane, the novel offers a dystopian vision that feels disturbingly close to our own reality. The regulation of bodies, the marginalisation of women, and the consolidation of state and corporate power create a world that is both speculative and painfully familiar. What makes the narrative particularly compelling is its attention to ordinary details: books, food, memory which illuminate the erosion of critical thought and personal freedom. Yet the novel never loses sight of the human capacity for resistance, locating hope not in grand gestures but in the stubborn refusal to surrender one’s humanity. — Dr Rakhshanda Jalil, writer, translator, literary historian

With the moral intensity of Kafka, the philosophical sweep of Milan Kundera, and a mythic imagination uniquely its own, Shashi Vair’s The Unlicensed Child is a dazzling neo-noir work of speculative fiction. Vair conjures an unforgettable future where parenthood is licensed, vigilance is biological, and the State governs not merely its citizens but their bodies, memories, and capacity to love. A haunting meditation on eugenics, surrogacy, bio-surveillance, and the architecture of power, The Unlicensed Child is at once intimate and epic, unsettling and profoundly humane. — Ashwani Kumar, poet, political scientist and professor at Tata Institute of Social Sciences

Shashi Vair is an engineer by training, a technologist by profession and a logophile by nature. He works with systems and structure by day, and with words when he can. His short fiction has appeared in literary journals.