A Love Letter to the Revolution: Review of Radhika Singh’s Earthly Playing Field

Zara Dershowitz Under Review:Earthly Playing Field. Radhika Singh. Common Notions Press, May 2026. In Earthly Playing Field, Radhika Singh delivers a genre-defying love story where the lovers never breathe the same air, and fight for a future they know they’ll never personally see. Ancient creatures emerge from the future to guide AI on a moral path and futuristic technology grows from mycelial networks in the ground. Singh uses these elements of speculative fiction to envision a better world, but this story is far from being an escapist fantasy. When Roma’s brother gives her a mysterious plant, she unknowingly becomes a participant in “the Cell”—a network of revolutionaries across the globe communicating in secret through a biological and more powerful alternative to the internet. Roma soon develops a crush on Leila, an alluring Iranian activist committed to revolution above all else. This, and the emergence of disembodied human souls who have traveled from the future through the…