Cognitive Estrangement in Speculative Fiction: A Social Commentary on Usman T. Malik’s Midnight Doorways

Abstract

Through a close reading of three stories from Usman T. Malik’s Midnight Doorways: Fables from Pakistan, the study analyzes how Darko Suvin’s theory of cognitive estrangement functions within the Pakistani anglophone speculative fiction. Cognitive estrangement is supplemented by defamiliarization theory, affect studies, myth criticism, and South Asian literary scholarship, giving direction to the thesis’s main argument that Malik’s world-building estranges the reader from everyday cultural realities while laying bare the deep-seated social tensions. In lieu of being decorative fantasies, the study dissects that Malik’s supernatural novums are cognitive instruments by applying Suvin’s pendulum analogy, and finds that they incite perception through the selected short fictions, Ishq, The Wandering City, and In the Ruins of Mohenjodaro. Exposing gendered violence, historical trauma, and institutional failures, Malik thus proves that these elements are better told in mythic and horror novums, whereas realist modes cannot fully express them. His fiction mobilizes such estrangements to reimagine Pakistani social realities and open new imaginative pathways for understanding violence, memory, and futurity.