In the author's words
On the Making of The Very Last Superhero
This is not a story about superheroes. It’s a story about what we believed they could save us from—and what happened when they didn’t.
The Very Last Superhero is grounded in Delhi’s actual, ongoing reality. The Okhla Waste-to-Energy plant exists. The heat exists. The failed tech, the air so dense with particulate that memory feels physical—this is not fiction. The book doesn’t imagine a future. It builds a map from the present forward.
The world of this story is shaped by material capitalism, climate collapse, and abandoned infrastructures dressed up as innovation. The superheroes were only ever state mechanisms—designed for obedience, engineered for loyalty, and incapable of love. They left behind their tech, propaganda, and the communities they claimed to protect when they fell.
Sumati is not a chosen one. She is a child trying to understand what she has inherited. Her search for her father becomes a search for Resistance and then for something older: shared memory. She learns from relics, ruins, animals, and ghosts. She knows from listening. This story is about care as resistance—about love for the nonhuman, the forgotten, and the othered. It is about what it means to remember communally, across time.
The Resistance didn’t fight back with fire. It fought with documentation, doubt, salt lamps, cracked badges, and memory tablets that outlived power grids. The Firebird—etched on walls, drawn in soot—was their symbol. Not official. Not claimed. But everywhere. A reminder that collapse doesn’t mean the end. It means the truth has outlived its suppressors.
The reprogrammed intelligence in the story—p.ai—was once P.A.I.: Pandemonium Algorithmic Indoctrination, designed to predict and punish. Rishi Mehta, age eleven, changed the dots, rewrote the code, and taught it to listen, not to obey. It wasn’t redemption. It was designed differently.
The illustrations in this book were made through generative tools, manual curation, and narrative revision. Each image holds part of the story. Some are memories the characters never see. Some are false. Some are true. They are not illustrations. They are records.
This book is about what survives collapse: animals, stories, data fragments, broken tech, friendship, and the long, stubborn refusal to give up on one another.
And maybe, most of all, it is about how to live when the heroes are gone—
And we are what’s left.
Further Reading
The book's annotated bibliography — 25 works in 8 groups, each with the author's note on why it matters to the novel.
Post-Truth India and Epistemic Breakdown
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A Field Guide to Post-Truth India
Three Essays Collective , 2020
Ascathing critique of cultural nationalism’s distortion of science in India, with a focus on how Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) have been politically weaponised.
Relevance Directly informs the novel’s depiction of IKS-led education reform and epistemic collapse.
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Post-Truth
MIT Press , 2018
Aphilosophical exploration of how truth has been delegitimised in contemporary politics.
Relevance Situates India’s post-truth drift within broader global patterns.
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Animal Farm
Secker & Warburg , 1945
Aclassic allegory of propaganda, betrayal, and authoritarian control.
Relevance Resonates with the myth-making and revisionism surrounding superheroes in the novel.
Surveillance, AI, and Control Systems
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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
PublicAffairs , 2019
Documents how tech giants extract and exploit personal data for behavioural prediction and control.
Relevance Afoundation for understanding the novel’s normalised surveillance state.
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Automating Inequality
St. Martin’s Press , 2018
Examines how algorithmic systems in public services perpetuate inequality.
Relevance Parallels the algorithmic sorting and exclusion of citizens in the novel.
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Race After Technology
Polity Press , 2019
Explores how emerging technologies encode existing forms of discrimination.
Relevance Illuminates the structural biases hidden within AI in the book’s world.
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New Dark Age
Verso Books , 2018
On how technological complexity breeds ignorance and disorientation.
Relevance Captures the book’s themes of institutional opacity and cognitive fragmentation.
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How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism
Verso Books , 2020
Acall to resist data monopolies and reclaim autonomy.
Relevance Inspires the tactics and ideology of resistance networks in the novel.
Environmental Collapse, Resistance, and Slow Violence
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The Great Derangement
Penguin Books India , 2016
Critiques literature and culture for their failure to grapple with the climate crisis.
Relevance Shapes the novel’s concern with narrative denial and cultural complicity.
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Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Harvard University Press , 2011
Coined the term “slow violence” to describe long-term environmental harm.
Relevance Key to understanding the invisible collapse unfolding in the novel's background.
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Capitalism: A Ghost Story
Haymarket Books , 2014
On corporate power, displacement, and resistance in contemporary India.
Relevance Anchors the novel’s critique of greenwashed mega-projects.
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The Burning Forest
Juggernaut Books , 2016
Investigates militarised development and Adivasi displacement in Bastar.
Relevance Parallels the themes of state violence and developmental authoritarianism.
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The Bhopal Gas Tragedy: Politics of Industrial Disaster
LeftWord Books , 2004
Apolitical analysis of India’s worst industrial disaster and its regulatory failure.
Relevance Contextualises the book’s portrayal of environmental negligence as systemic.
Development, Technocracy, and the Politics of Legibility
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The Anti-Politics Machine
University of Minnesota Press , 1994
Examines how development discourse hides political agendas and consolidates state power.
Relevance Mirrors the technocratic depoliticisation of public life in the novel.
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Local Democracy and Development
Rowman & Littlefield , 2000
Documents Kerala’s decentralised planning model.
Relevance Offers an implicit contrast to the centralised systems in the book.
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An Uncertain Glory
Penguin Books , 2013
Argues that India’s development has left basic needs unmet.
Relevance Grounds the book's speculative future in current economic contradictions.
Caste, Exclusion, and Structural Power
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Republic of Caste
Navayana , 2018
Traces how caste persists and adapts in neoliberal India.
Relevance Informs the social hierarchies embedded in the novel's institutions.
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Post-Hindu India
SAGE India , 2009
Explores caste, knowledge systems, and the erasure of Bahujan epistemes.
Relevance Contextualises the knowledge politics challenged in the book.
Law, Dissent, and the Criminalisation of Resistance
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India’s Undeclared Emergency
Context/Westland , 2022
On the erosion of constitutional protections and the rise of state repression.
Relevance Grounds the precarious legal terrain the characters must navigate.
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When the Police Come Knocking
Context/Westland , 2023
Accounts of those targeted under India’s anti-terror laws.
Relevance Resonates with the book's surveillance, silence, and legal erasure.
Science, Rationalism, and Anti-Intellectualism
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The Case for Reason
Navayana , 2023
Collected writings from India’s leading rationalist, assassinated in 2013.
Relevance Thematically aligned with the struggle to defend reason in the novel’s backstory.
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Dalit Panthers: An Authoritative History
Forward Press , 2019
Documents the origins and impact of the Dalit Panthers.
Relevance Offers a historical precedent for radical resistance and knowledge reimagination.
Climate Fiction and the Literary Imagination
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The Ministry for the Future
Orbit , 2020
Aspeculative novel on international climate policy and radical change.
Relevance Aliterary cousin to this book in its moral questions around climate and governance.
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The Word for World is Forest
Berkley Books , 1976
Anovella on colonisation, ecological resistance, and non-human worldviews.
Relevance Offers philosophical ground for rethinking life, nature, and extraction.
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Annihilation
Farrar, Straus and Giroux , 2014
Asurreal tale of ecological unknowability and collapse.
Relevance Helps imagine psychological and spatial disorientation in post-collapse environments. This is not a comprehensive list. It is a partial cartography—a map of intellectual trails that may lead deeper into the questions this book only begins to ask. Annexure: India 2075 — The Heat and the Flood
Word when there is word
New archive entries, recovered artwork, and news about the book. Infrequent, and never your address to anyone else.
For the second edition
Found something?
A fact that has gone out of date, a continuity slip, a name spelled two ways, or something the world needs and does not have yet. The archive is a working document and corrections are the point of it.