Most novels aren’t directly credited with starting wars. Yet fiction still instigates change. Fiction can say publicly what might otherwise appear unsayable, combating the coerced silence that is a favored weapon of those who have power. In Pakistan, for example, where numerous hatreds — including of Hindus, of atheists, of supposed sexual transgressors — have been actively promoted by the state for purposes of social control, we have seen Hindu characters, nonbelieving characters, sexually transgressive characters being humanized in fiction.

Over half a century ago, Saadat Hasan Manto lampooned religious and nationalistic bigotry in Pakistan, opening up political and creative space for so many Pakistani writers, myself included, to enter. Reading his acerbic, wanton, irreverent short stories for the first time, I thought: “Wait, you can write that?” It was an electric experience for me, like reading James Baldwin and Toni Morrison would be, like reading Chinua Achebe would be.

I encountered Achebe in my final year of high school in Lahore, the sole African writer on our syllabus. “Things Fall Apart” forced me to grapple with how infantilizing the experience of colonialism must have been — how it killed off the adulthood of generations of parents, made children of them, made the colonizer into the adult, the colonized into the children of children. It was the only assigned novel I can remember my friends and myself talking about incessantly after school.

Politics is shaped by people. And people, sometimes, are shaped by the fiction they read. After Manto, I was more aware of the dangerous social desiccation being imposed in the name of religion around me in Pakistan. After Achebe, I was more concerned with agency, the notion that we Pakistanis needed to take responsibility for solving our own problems, because blaming the outside world, even when partly justified, served only to perpetuate our own sense of powerlessness.

I also read George Orwell’s “1984” around this time. The Berlin Wall fell the year I graduated from high school, and so it seemed to me that Orwell had gotten things wrong, that his dystopia, no matter how believably chilling, could never be humanity’s future. I associated “1984” with life behind the Iron Curtain. Only later, living in London in the noughties, an era of Bush-Blair doublethink and perpetual “war on terror,” did it occur to me that Orwell’s novel was set not in Russia but in Britain, and that perhaps the only reason his terrifying vision of society had been prevented from coming fully into existence was that he had already warned us — for otherwise the tendencies to slip into his nightmare were everywhere to be seen.