Vajra Chandrasekera: The Strange Architecture of Power

A gate ordinarily protects property by controlling who can enter. In Vajra Chandrasekera’s ‘Half-Eaten Cities,’ it also marks where the ocean stops. Wealth becomes an invisible seawall; ordinary households are inundated while protected owners extend their dry territories. The fantastic premise does not distract from a recognizable society. It makes that society’s exemptions impossible to ignore. This compact story is an unusually strong starting point for a writer whose strangeness reorganizes the relationship between power and everyday life.

Chandrasekera is a Sri Lankan speculative-fiction writer, identified through his own official biography. His first two novels, The Saint of Bright Doors and Rakesfall, were published by Tordotcom in July 2023 and June 2024 respectively. He also worked as a fiction editor at Strange Horizons from 2016 to 2022. The short story should therefore be approached as part of a substantial practice in its own right, not simply as an apprenticeship retrospectively justified by successful novels.

The city without an exceptional survivor

‘Half-Eaten Cities’ appears in ASU’s Everything Change, Volume II, first published January 2019. Its city is unnamed. Neither the writer’s nationality nor familiar domestic materials authorize identifying it as Colombo or treating the fiction as a disguised account of a particular event. What the text establishes is a social geography: a collective population exposed to rising water and another collective insulated by substantial ownership.

The first-person plural is the essential formal decision. A named hero might give the reader a route out of the crowd; Chandrasekera instead makes the crowd the speaking subject. Its members disagree about treading water, rooftop shelter and bodily transformation, so collectivity does not mean perfect unanimity. It means that no individual’s exceptional escape can be mistaken for a solution to their common condition. The story’s compression gains political precision at the cost of intimate individual characterization.

Repetition supplies momentum. Successive clauses send the sea through lanes, bedrooms and stairwells, with an incantatory cadence repeatedly interrupted at privileged boundaries. The water’s imagined teeth and caution make it at once predatory and intimidated. It seems capable of dismantling ordinary life yet unwilling to offend true wealth. That inconsistency is the premise’s satirical intelligence: the supposedly universal disaster behaves according to a social rule.

Ownership becomes a physical force

The scientists distinguish accumulated ownership from coins or banknotes. Putting money in one’s mouth will not keep a body afloat. The relevant power is the kind of wealth the speakers have never possessed and scarcely understand. An economic abstraction acquires geographical effects. Protected people then exploit those effects, recovering territory and installing helicopter pads, satellite dishes and delivery routes. Safety is not simply something they retain; it enables further acquisition.

The story’s cultural joke is equally sharp. People in the water attempt to watch television through wealthy households’ windows. Their criticisms receive approving circulation from those households, but acknowledgment changes nothing. Programmes depict the ocean from beaches, choosing leisure’s angle on what others experience as invasion. The problem is not merely inadequate representation. It is the possibility that sophisticated agreement can coexist perfectly well with the material arrangement being criticized.

Domestic detail prevents the allegory floating free of bodies. Red floor polish, once part of ordinary comfort, contaminates the water entering the rooms. Its chemical classification interrupts the lyricism with regulatory specificity. Asbestos roofs offer another defective refuge: abrasive, overheated and hazardous. The exposed do not move from a polluted system into a clean alternative. They must survive among the toxic remains of what used to count as shelter.

Transformation without absolution

When the population finally gives itself gills, the ending permits survival but refuses a simple emancipation. Nothing establishes that privilege has been dismantled. The burden of transformation remains with the people the sea reaches. Reading the gills as a practical technological proposal would miss their function: they dramatize how adaptation can be demanded of the vulnerable while the conditions distributing vulnerability remain untouched.

The last movement stretches towards a future in which walking might be learned again. That scale unsettles the emergency story’s expectation of immediate rescue. Survival has opened time, not resolved injustice. The formal experiment works because the impossible event and the ordinary infrastructure continually correct one another. Its limitation is also visible: readers seeking particular lives may find the collective voice distant. Yet its refusal to offer one reassuring survivor is precisely what preserves its question.

The later novels: context, not borrowed verdicts

Macmillan’s description of The Saint of Bright Doors introduces Fetter, raised to kill his sainted father, and his subsequent life in Luriat. Divine power encounters the pressures of metropolitan existence, including therapy, organization and the mysterious doors of the title. These official premises suggest a continuity of interest in extraordinary forces embedded in social systems. They do not establish how every narrative turn is executed. This profile has not examined the complete novel and makes no full-book assessment.

The author’s books page describes Rakesfall as a standalone science-fiction epic about two souls bound across time. Its second-novel publication record is distinct from the debut’s. The premise offers a much wider temporal scale than the drowned city, inviting attention to how speculative fiction can unsettle linear accounts of identity and history. That invitation should remain an invitation: publisher framing and other reviewers’ enthusiasm are not substitutes for examining the whole work.

Recognition, precisely named

The Saint of Bright Doors won the 2023 Nebula Award for Best Novel, presented in June 2024, the 2024 Ignyte Award for Outstanding Novel: Adult and the 2024 Locus Award for First Novel. The award-year and ceremony-year distinction matters. Rakesfall won the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction and was one of four winners of the 2024 Otherwise Award, announced in May 2025. Those verified categories should not be exchanged for a vague list of honours or turned into awards for this short story.

Recognition establishes reception, not an obligation to admire. Begin with ‘Half-Eaten Cities’ because its complete authorized text permits a reader to test the work directly. Its architecture of power is strange, but its questions are exact: who can keep the water out, whose bodies must change, and what does agreement cost those who remain dry? The companion review places that experiment beside nine other stories without making them a single school of climate fiction. No interview, author participation or endorsement is implied, and no unlicensed portrait is reproduced.