*I don't wanna interfere with this guy's interesting and laudable sci-fi consciousness-raising... Except to say, if this defensive stuff about colonialism were really true, nobody would have ever written any innovative science fiction outside the metropolitan centers of Paris, London, and New York City.
World Building in A Hot Climate
Anil Menon
I came across Paramjit Kumar’s Scourge From the Sky (1964) many years ago, on my way home from school, in one of Mumbai’s then-myriad footpath bookstores. The slim cloth-bound octavo volume, modestly self-labeled the “Greatest Science Fiction of the Century,” was about an interstellar adventure complete with flying metallic saucers, imperialist aliens, hapless abductees, heaving boojums, one “unreconstructed” Nazi, trips to Mars and Jupiter and “lustful orgies” by said Nazi. Did I mention it also included Eternity? Well it did. The last chapter was titled “Back to Earth From Eternity.”
Had it been written a few decades earlier, Kumar’s work could have thrown its hammy arms around other cutting-edge Campbellian SF. Translated forwards in time however, it’s a misfit. 1964 was the age of Rocannon’s World and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Stand on Zanzibar was four years away and J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition was about to get banned. Kumar’s book had all of the 60s fixations— nuclear doomsday, commie menace, UFOs, excess hair— but its SF machinery was badly out of date.
I’m fond of the book and the memory of finding it, but it’s become clear to me that its problem—premature obsolescence— continues to plague much of Indian SF in English.
If Darko Suvin right[1], then SF’s task is to build new worlds. It’s hard to pin down what “new” is, but it’s easy to identify what it achieves. It effects cognitive estrangement. It freaks you out. Ideally, it flips you inside out, bug-eyed and porcupine. Suvin argued that SF writers create new worlds in one of two ways: (1) by extrapolating the natural world, or (2) by analogizing with the natural world.
Indian SF also bears this out. The worlds in Amitav Ghosh’s “The Calcutta Chromosome,” Sudhir Jha’s “Matrubhoomi” and Pradip Ghosh’s “A Long Day’s Night,” use extrapolation and analogy to striking effect. The work of authors like Ashok Banker, Samit Basu, Priya Chabria, Rimi Chatterjee, Abha Iyengar, Manjula Padmanabhan, Anushka Ravishankar, Anshumani Rudra, Pervin Saket, Vandana Singh, Kaushik Vishwanathan and others all point to a new era in SF.
But these exceptions only highlight the problem with the average. What we often find in Indian SF is world-reusing, not world-building. The stories extrapolate and analogize the worlds of golden-age SF, not the natural world. The robots are from Asimov, the spaceships are from space-operas, the aliens are from 60s Star Trek, the time-travel is from Wells, and the gender-relations are straight out of the 50s. It’s a pastiche world, lovingly glued together from bits and pieces of remembered stories. There’s an old-fashioned, defanged feel to the stories, as if estrangement had been collared and corralled into the safe confines of a folktale. If it were bad writing then we could see it as a case of Sturgeon’s Law, but the problem isn’t bad writing, it’s obsolescence.
Part of the reason for this may have to do with the fact that very little of modern SF is available in most Indian bookstores. No Gardner Dozois or Ellen Datlow anthologies. No Octavia Butler. No Samuel Delany. No George Zebrowski. No Jim Kelly, John Kessel. No Geoff Ryman. No Kelly Link. No Jonathan Lethem. No Greg Egan, Kim Stanley Robinson, Bruce Sterling, Paul McAuley, Jeffrey Ford, or Tim Powers. The big metros have bookstores that might carry Neal Stephenson, Cory Doctorow and Ian Macdonald, but by and large, the smaller ones file Asimov right next to James Hadley Chase and call it a day.
Asimov is big in India. Asimov is very big everywhere. I don’t know how Asimov-bhai pulled it off, but he hit notes that everyone seems to enjoy. He’s been translated into every regional Indian language. I estimate some 200 to 300 million Indians must have heard of Asimov and read one or two stories of his. They get him.
So how come they can’t get Asimov’s magazine in India?
No doubt, there’s a reasonable answer based on the cost of beans, Ben Franklin’s bifocals and what not. Besides, when I say stuff is unavailable, I mean it’s not legally available. Thanks to Al Gore, a lot of fiction is downloadable via torrent files.
But the pirate still has to know what to download. And what the pirate knows is often shaped by the pirate’s preferences. If golden age SF is what most Indian readers are exposed to, then those are the sort of worlds they’ll reach for when they begin to write.
This disconnect from mainstream SF is only part of the reason why much of Indian SF—at least, the one in English– feels dated. Paradoxically, the other aspect is that there is not enough of a disconnect....
