Earthly Playing Field

Love and revolution in a crumbling world order.

Roma has a steady job, a mortgage, and a surrogate family in Queens. But as she moves through her daily routines, the powerful Empire that rules her world bares its teeth elsewhere—crushing freedom movements across the planet, including the Punjabi farmers’ uprising where her younger brother struggles on the frontlines.

Roma’s life is upended when her older brother entrusts her with a strange gift: an ordinary-looking plant that manifests a sophisticated bioengineered technology. The ‘cell’ opens a portal for an extraterrestrial spirit-body bearing news of a liberated future–and the potential to hack AI warfare—propelling Roma and her family into the core of a rising resistance.

As dreams and dialectics converge, Roma meditates on the role of faith, ruminating on mystic poetics and anticolonial legacies while yearning for a bewitching woman whose heart will only ever belong to the revolution. 

Praise for Earthly Playing Field:

“A complex coming-of-political-consciousness narrative . . . heady and fascinating.” —Publishers Weekly

“Defiant, compassionate and compulsively readable, Earthly Playing Field finds an exquisite balance between speculative fiction and urgent political insight. That Singh deftly brings this all together into a thrilling narrative is a resounding testament to this writer's striking talents.” —Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the Booker Prize

“The novel of ideas is back and in spectacular shape. Radhika Singh crafts a rip-roaring adventure inside of a geopolitical graduate school seminar inside of a revolutionary handbook, wrapped in a tale of queer longing—a literary-Marxist turducken for the ages. This book makes you believe not only that the revolution is coming, but that it's winnable. Earthly Playing Field is a showcase of a radical and talented writer with a long and exciting career ahead of her.” —Alejandro Varela, author of Middle Spoon

“Earthly Playing Field is not just a novel. It is a library of revolutionary possibility that meets us where we are and where we could be.” —Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde

“Polemical and passionate . . . a worthy addition to the long tradition of socially-minded speculative fiction.” —Chicago Review of Books

“Genre-defying . . . a love letter to the revolutionary spirit.” —Ancillary Review of Books

Radhika Singh is a writer and editor living in Queens, New York. Her fiction speculates on the presence of magic in this world, the connection to spirit and consciousness, and the power of the people to organize for collective liberation. Her novel Weirdly Tuned Antennae, winner of the 2025 Sukenick Prize for Innovative Fiction, is forthcoming from FC2 Press. For more information visit: rhsingh.work.