Karun Sagar's 'The Culling Games': A Cosmic Epic on Empathy and Power
In the literary landscape, some books merely tell stories, while others construct entire worlds. Karun Sagar's debut, The Culling Games, achieves something far rarer: it builds a cosmos and then poses a profound question about the moral weight a single human heart must bear when the universe itself is watching. This sweeping epic, structured as a long poetic journey across 21 sections, defies genre conventions, drawing from science fiction, myth, anime cosmology, and political allegory, yet it firmly belongs to the realm of poetry—incantatory, recursive, and breath-driven.
A Narrative of Blood, Death, and Survival
At the heart of the book is Anika, a character who embodies multiple roles: child, weapon, inheritor, and god-in-waiting. Born into a lineage where destiny is a burden rather than a gift, Anika is surrounded by a diverse cast including survivors, emancipated machines, tree-mothers, jesters of death, orphaned boys, and entire civilizations reduced to collateral damage. The language of the narrative repeats itself like trauma, with refrains of blood and death that gradually shift from shocking to indicting.
Karun Sagar masterfully illustrates how repetition normalizes violence, transforming it into policy, history, and accepted fact. The book delves deeply into themes of life, death, and memory, introducing the chilling concept of "making living, lived"—a grammatical shift that extinguishes existence. This phrase encapsulates the book's sharp political insight: mass death does not require monsters, only systems fluent in euphemism.
Intimacy and Breath as Resistance
Despite its cosmic scale, The Culling Games is not nihilistic. It reserves its deepest attention for moments of intimacy, such as a hand on a shoulder, a slowly learned breath, or a child trying to remain calm amid universal chaos. Sagar repeatedly emphasizes breath as a form of resistance—to breathe is to refuse spectacle and to retain humanity in the face of divinity. This alignment with older philosophical traditions adds depth to the futuristic narrative.
The poetic voice is deliberately uneven, shifting from playful to brutal and even flippant in the face of catastrophe. This tonal instability may unsettle readers seeking polish, but it thematically mirrors the untidiness of power and survival. When the narrative slows, it becomes meditative and monastic, offering moments of silence and reflection.
Cultural Relevance and Moral Complexity
The Culling Games arrives at a time when global discourse is dominated by conversations on genocide, technological power, moral fatigue, and selective empathy. The cages that appear across solar systems, deciding who may pass and who may not, resonate uncomfortably with real-world issues like borders, algorithms, citizenships, and economies of worth. Sagar does not lecture; instead, he allegorizes, implicating the reader without direct instruction.
What sets this work apart from many speculative epics is its refusal to offer easy redemption. Heroism here is defined not by victory but by conviction in the face of consequences. Even the strongest characters cannot undo past actions, and salvation leaves scars. The final movement of the book underscores that surviving power is often harder than acquiring it.
A Brave and Resonant Literary Achievement
As an object, The Culling Games embraces its ambition, reading like a text meant to be chanted, argued with, and returned to. It does not seek universal likability but aims for resonance—a braver goal. This is not a comfortable book, nor should it be. It challenges readers to consider whether empathy can scale, whether ethics can survive abstraction, and whether godhood is anything other than magnified grief.
Karun Sagar has crafted a debut that is fiercely imaginative, morally restless, and emotionally unafraid. The Culling Games feels less like escapism and more like a reckoning, leaving a lingering impression not of destruction but of the quiet insistence that even the strongest are allowed to be alive. This line alone justifies the profound journey of this speculative epic.
