R adhika Singh’s Earthly Playing Field is a novel that is firmly rooted in our erupting, unfolding present moment. There is a lot to learn from its pages, which cite thinkers like V. I. Lenin, Guru Gobind Singh, and Assata Shakur. Singh has clear and admirable political commitments as a writer, and can be placed squarely within a lineage of leftist speculative fiction. Reading Earthly Playing Field, however, I wondered about the utility of both fiction and the speculative mode to elaborate its politics. There is a necessary urgency to the topics in Earthly Playing Field, but the novel never reaches an emotional threshold because much of the heart-racing action happens off the page.