Adapted from the afterword
On the Making of The Very Last Superhero
This story is about what we believed superheroes could save us from, and about what happened when they did not save us.
The Very Last Superhero is grounded in Delhi’s actual, ongoing reality. The Okhla Waste-to-Energy plant exists, and so does the heat. The failed technology exists, and so does the air so dense with particulate that memory feels physical. All of this is real. The book builds its map of the future outward from the present.
The world of this story is shaped by material capitalism, climate collapse and abandoned infrastructures presented as innovation. The superheroes were never anything more than state mechanisms. They were designed for obedience, engineered for loyalty and incapable of love. When they fell, they left behind their technology, their propaganda and the communities they claimed to protect.
Sumati is a child trying to understand what she has inherited. Her search for her father becomes a search for the Resistance and then for something older, which is shared memory. She learns from relics, ruins, animals and ghosts, and she learns by listening. This story is about care as resistance, which includes love for the nonhuman, the forgotten and the othered. It is also about what it means to remember communally, across time.
The Resistance fought with documentation, doubt, salt lamps, cracked badges and memory tablets that outlived power grids. Its symbol was the Firebird, etched on walls and drawn in soot. Nobody made it official and nobody claimed it, and it appears everywhere. It reminds the reader that after a collapse the truth has outlived its suppressors.
The reprogrammed intelligence in the story, p.ai, was once P.A.I., which stood for Pandemonium Algorithmic Indoctrination and was designed to predict and punish. Rishi Mehta, at the age of eleven, changed the dots, rewrote the code and taught it to listen and to stop obeying. The old system was replaced by a differently designed one.
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 that the characters never see, some are false and some are true. All of them serve as records of the story’s world.
This book is about what survives collapse: animals, stories, data fragments, broken technology, friendship and the long, stubborn refusal to give up on one another.
Perhaps most of all, it is about how to live when the heroes are gone and we are what is left.
Further reading
Adapted from the book's annotated bibliography: 25 works in 8groups, each with the author's note on why it matters to the novel. The citations are as printed, and the notes have been edited for the site.
Post-truth India and epistemic breakdown
A Field Guide to Post-Truth India
Three Essays Collective, 2020
A critique of how cultural nationalism distorts science in India, with a focus on how Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) have been used as political weapons.
Relevance Directly informs the novel’s depiction of IKS-led education reform and epistemic collapse.
Post-Truth
MIT Press, 2018
A philosophical exploration of how truth has been delegitimised in contemporary politics.
Relevance Situates India’s post-truth drift within broader global patterns.
Animal Farm
Secker & Warburg, 1945
A classic allegory of propaganda, betrayal and authoritarian control.
Relevance Echoes the myth-making and revisionism surrounding superheroes in the novel.
Surveillance, AI, and control systems
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
PublicAffairs, 2019
Documents how tech giants extract and exploit personal data for behavioural prediction and control.
Relevance A foundation for understanding the novel’s normalised surveillance state.
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.
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.
New Dark Age
Verso Books, 2018
Argues that technological complexity breeds ignorance and disorientation.
Relevance Captures the book’s themes of institutional opacity and cognitive fragmentation.
How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism
Verso Books, 2020
A call 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
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.
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.
Capitalism: A Ghost Story
Haymarket Books, 2014
Writes about corporate power, displacement and resistance in contemporary India.
Relevance Anchors the novel’s critique of greenwashed mega-projects.
The Burning Forest
Juggernaut Books, 2016
Investigates militarised development and Adivasi displacement in Bastar.
Relevance Parallels the themes of state violence and developmental authoritarianism.
The Bhopal Gas Tragedy: Politics of Industrial Disaster
LeftWord Books, 2004
A political 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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
India’s Undeclared Emergency
Context/Westland, 2022
Describes the erosion of constitutional protections and the rise of state repression.
Relevance Grounds the precarious legal terrain the characters must face.
When the Police Come Knocking
Context/Westland, 2023
Gathers accounts from people targeted under India’s anti-terror laws.
Relevance Echoes the book's surveillance, silence, and legal erasure.
Science, rationalism, and anti-intellectualism
The Case for Reason
Navayana, 2023
Collects writings by India’s leading rationalist, who was assassinated in 2013.
Relevance Thematically aligned with the struggle to defend reason in the novel’s backstory.
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
The Ministry for the Future
Orbit, 2020
A speculative novel on international climate policy and radical change.
Relevance A literary cousin to this book in its moral questions around climate and governance.
The Word for World is Forest
Berkley Books, 1976
A novella on colonisation, ecological resistance and non-human worldviews.
Relevance Offers philosophical ground for rethinking life, nature, and extraction.
Annihilation
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014
A surreal tale of ecological unknowability and collapse.
Relevance Helps imagine psychological and spatial disorientation in post-collapse environments.
This list is incomplete. It maps a few intellectual trails that may lead deeper into the questions this book only begins to ask.
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