Indian science fiction that is not rehashed mythology (part 5 of 5)

Science Fiction | The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction | Tarun K Saint (editor)

Continuing the ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (I really liked it) review... This is part 3 of a post broken up so that I can tag all the authors in a story-by-story review. You can read part 4 here.

Anandna by Rukmini Bhaya Nair

This is in two parts, a story and a short poem. The poem only makes sense if you read the story first. The story doesn’t have quite the impact unless you read the poem at the end. There’s a large helping of brave self-pity in it, but the poem largely mitigates the maudlinism. It’s about a trio of dedicated researchers who make a drug that converts pain into pleasure. Things don’t stay in their control.

We Were Never Here by Nur Nasreen Ibrahim

A creepy story about a sanctuary for women who can’t take their downtrodden place in the world any more. There are costs, and the benefits may not even exist. “Some of us even fear that no one had noticed our departure.”

The Narrative of Naushirwan Shavaksha Sheikh Chilli by Keki N Daruwalla

Sheikh Chilli is one of the prototypical too-clever-for-his-own-good boastful guys of folklore. This story features an insolvent crook who borrows hugely and then flees the country along with his girlfriend (where haven’t we heard something like that in recent times?) to settle on the Moon and make merry. The twists are that he’s the last surviving Parsi. This is not as effervescent a story as you might expect. Decidedly heavy handed satire.

Looking Up by SB Divya

I found this story formulaic. It didn’t touch me in the right way. It’s about a candidate for passenger to Mars, who’s applied for a seat mainly to get as far as possible from the accident in her childhood, and about reconciliation with family. Predictable.

Reunion by Vandana Singh

Mahua has helped to mitigate climate change in Mumbai and its environs by moving to a decentralised village-style economy with rounded huts to withstand the ferocious new cyclones (I roll my eyes at such utopianism, but it’s not too central to the story), and, thankfully making it science fiction, smart connections between all people and things in the village. In flashback, we see how she came to do what she did, the AI and the AR, and what happened to her sister Kalpana and her friend Raghu on the way. The best parts about the story are the looking back to the present day as a sort of golden age, the Age of Kuber, where wealth abounded and resource was wasted.

All in all, a good collection, with some outright gems, and some pieces one just has to grit one’s teeth and plod through. Hopefully, there will be more reviews of collections of Indian science fiction that is not merely rehashed mythology (hint: yes, there will be. Stay tuned).

...End of part 5 and we finally reach the end of the chopped up long post...

Indian science fiction that is not rehashed mythology (part 4 of 5)

Science Fiction | The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction | Tarun K Saint (editor)

Continuing the ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (I really liked it) review... This is part 3 of a post broken up so that I can tag all the authors in a story-by-story review. You can read part 3 here.

The Beneficient Brahma by Chandrashekhar Sastry

This is a fantasy, not science fiction. It’s the fairy godmother trope with a just a little twist.

The Goddess Project by Giti Chandra

This is out and out sci fi, and the reveal at the end is a jarring extrapolation of contemporary mobs and their BMKJ cries. The smidgeon of hope is insufficient, though I suppose that may well be the best we can get.

The Last Tiger by Mohammad Salman

This is a satire that is so satirical and pointed that the less attention that is drawn to the fact, the safer the author is. Hats off, man. This is dark humour at its best and most cruel to the target, with laugh out loud slapstick moments and awful puns.

A Night with the Joking Clown by Rimi B Chatterjee

When most of the men die of over sensitive skin from Male Hypertoxic Syndrome, the rest of them rule the world, and the women are slaves, hoping to ‘make it’ to the level of getting a boyfriend instead of just being slaves. This society mashes toxic masculinity, passive femininity and predatory capitalism. Into this evil world comes an underground singer, causing disruption and dreams in the slave pits. The narrator, a New Guy without a lineage, and so lower in the pecking order, is given the job of flushing out this provocateur. I believe a book is forthcoming. But I prefer the simpler viciousness of the slave society in A for Anything (Damon Knight). This is more than I can stomach. It is gamer fantasy gone horribly wrong.

The Dream by Muhammed Zafar Iqbal (translation)

Julian jerks awake from a dream of being torn by wild dogs. Could this world, too, be a dream? He knows now how to find out. A short and brilliant gem of a story. The world will never be quite real after this.

And on this whimsical note, I once again press Pause, and and start a fresh post for the rest of the stories in this collection.

...End of Part 4...

[Link to Part 5]

Indian science fiction that is not rehashed mythology (part 1 of 5)

Science Fiction | The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction | Tarun K Saint (editor)

⭐⭐⭐⭐ (I really liked it)

I have mixed feelings about this collection. To start with, I had high expectations. After all, stories set in the Subcontinent would be set in my daily milieu. Plus, they were science fiction. This is a genre that does not have much of a dedicated market in India, especially in English. So people like me have to cast a world-wide net, and rely on translations or English language publications. That is a separate essay, which I am not writing here.

The collection itself has different levels of writing. Some of them are such gems, I want to buy copies of the book and gift them around. Hence, overall, 4 stars (I really liked it). There are poems, also, and poetry is in the eye of the beholder, but again, some left me cold and some were my beamish boys.

But some of it is eye-rollingly disappointing. Especially the old historical stories in translation. Some of it is not science fiction. Sorry, Tarun K Saint and Manjula Padmanabhan, you included some stories because you liked them and because the writers perhaps write science fiction, but these were not the stories that are science fiction. I was forcibly reminded of a hoity-toity reviewer of a Terry Pratchett book (which the publisher’s found fit for weird reasons to add as a blurb) which described him as ‘one of the premier satirists’ of the day. I remember reading that, curling my lip and muttering, No, no, and again no, buddy, you’ve missed the whole point. Certainly, some science fiction makes satirical points. But if that’s the primary aim, it dates fast and horribly, and the gruesome remains are turned over by foresters while holding their noses and poking about in the ruins. And there are usually not too many arguments about which animal’s scat and/or remains are being turned over, though some may recall seeing the beast in the wild with fond nostalgia. And yet, I feel reluctant to dismiss some of the pieces just because they are not science fiction, because some of these pieces are such extremely good satire. I guess the editors felt the same tug, so I’ll provisionally forgive them.

So, to the story-by-story. (Only because there is a limit on the number of tags I can put on a post, shall I split this into two or more posts).

Foreword: Spice-ship to Infinity by Manjula Padmanabhan

In which one of the most famous names in this collection brings us fascinating historical tidbits,  ponders inclusivity, voice and cultural references, and reaches unhappy conclusions on the perils of compromise and marketing pressures.

Introduction: SF Matters: South Asian Futures to Come by Tarun K Saint

This is almost a literary thesis, with no less than 91 footnotes, and brings us a doubtless difficult-to-write yet concise summary of South Asian sci fi, set in context both in time and space (the whole world).

Planet of Terror by Adrish Bardhan (translation)

One of the mistakes that anthology planners make is to start with a historical piece, the oldest one they can get hold of. This is a very light piece, it reminds me of sci fi that I used to read in Children’s World when I was a kid (I’m not knocking the magazine; it’s still the best kids’ magazine in the world; their monthly round-up of current affairs is the utmost neutral and accurate news summary on the planet, that alone is worth the subscription price). But this kind of fantastic story is now a done-to-death trope, and has no freshness any more.

Inspector Matadeen on the Moon by Harishankar Parsai (translation)

This is one of the prime examples of satire that has dated badly. In 1985, the angst and black humour of Jane Bhi Do Yaaro (the movie) was still fresh and the flavour of the month. This Inspector Matadeen story is a walk down that dystopian lane, harsh, cruel almost, satirical and over the top.

Stealing the Sea by Asif Aslam Farrukhi

This is a mood piece, a slice-of-life look at instant crowds in urban India and the stereotypical people who populate them. Withal, it’s slightly cli-fi (climate change fiction) which is the token sci fi theme making an appearance, a take on present day urban systems, and has a sad ending. 

By this point, I was seriously wondering what I’d got myself into.

Chernobyl by Somendra Singh Kharola

A long poem or a short opinion with its starting point as Chernobyl, a trek across cultures, and an end that is a question mark. I’m not sure I like it, or that I will remember it years from now, though some lines have great power. YMMV.

The Sea Sings at Night by Mimi Mondal

Thank goodness for this story, otherwise, I would have shut the book and missed some of the wonders to come. This is about a narrator who loves one of the sea folk (that hunt for the sea fauna that “Mumbai is teeming with”). A compassionate look at holding on and letting go, at assimilation and maintaining one’s culture in the face of immense social pressure, at love and the residue of loss, at being an alien in the Big City.

And at this point, I press Pause, and start a fresh post for the rest of the stories in this collection.

...End of Part 1...

[Link to Part 2]

Thrillers by Indians, for Indians and of Indians

Thriller | The Terrorist | Juggi Bhasin

There are a lot of thrillers being written in English in India these days. This is good news. We can read about outlandish capers set in our own localities instead of in places we are unlikely to see in our lifetimes.

 

The Terrorist is set mostly in Delhi, though frankly, I barely recognise the places. I really didn't know that Karnataka Bhawan was a den of iniquity. I always thought of it as the place to go to eat delicious thali food at ludicrously low prices.

Anyhow, there is a young engineer who falls in love and then gets kicked out of his job and loses the love of his life, just because he happens to be Muslim. His evil employer gets him framed in a terrorist case, and the radicals around him further embroil him in terrorism. Finally, being brutalised by the police during 'interrogation' turns him into a hard-core terrorist, yet, withal, one who only kills police and army people.

In the meantime, there is a young Army officer who is trained in counter-terrorism in a remote place in the North East. His rich mother has driven his Army father to suicide, and he has cut off all ties with her in revenge. His soul's shell is breached by his best friend, an Army buddy who is just as good a soldier as him, but has a heart. He falls in love with a woman his mother 'arranges' for him to meet, but because of his mother, the two are sundered and he also falls out with his best friend.

He gets posted to J&K where he is seconded to the local police. There, he slowly wins over the police team assigned to him. One day, his teammate's niece is gang-raped by powerful politicians and the police. Her sister records the evidence, and his teammate is now trying to save her and her family.

The book opens with the battle of our hero to rescue the girl and her family. He is court-martialled for it, and emerges vindicated. The Prime Minister (thinly disguised Manmohan Singh), in the meantime, imports an Indian-origin American to run an anti-terrorist cell.

Now, the main action takes place, with the terrorist, known as Ghaznavi, taking on the anti-terrorist Prithvi (named for the nuke, not the planet), and vice versa. Ghaznavi is teamed with a lethal young woman, whose mother was brutalised in one of the communal riots that are the cauldrons for creating radicals in India. She disappeared when her mother was killed and their terrorist cell destroyed (and Ghaznavi was radicalised), but clearly, she went over to Pakistan and turned against her country.

The two work with a set of other cells to attack a leader of the main opposition party, one who is gaining traction by having overseen a communal riot in Gujarat (no prizes for guessing who this person is thinly disguised as). Police and the anti-terrorist cell race to uncover them and foil their evil plans. Two plans are foiled, two are not.

Finally, we have the much-awaited face-off between Ghaznavi and Prithvi, and a finale with enough explosions to satisfy any die-hard thriller buff.

I pendulumed between liking Juggi Bhasin's plot and writing and being appalled by it. Casual cynicism wars with some truly well-fleshed out passages. I had more sympathy with the antagonist than the protagonist, for most of the book. All in all, a fast but shallow read, and the characters could do with more fleshing out. As it is, it's written for Bollywood. You can expect to see a movie on it, if Bhasin's agent does a good job of the negotiation. I can just about imagine Neil Nitin Mukesh and Vivek Oberoi in the movie!