Beyond the spaceship

In an interview with The Guardian in 2003, Margaret Atwood, by any measure one of the most successful authors alive, distanced some of her works (most notably The Handmaid’s Tale and the Oryx and Crake trilogy) from the term “science fiction”. She said she preferred “speculative fiction” instead, claiming, “Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen.”

While science fiction fans were less than impressed, Atwood’s statement did, ironically, strike at the heart of the issue — the mainstream image of science fiction is indeed the one propagated by super-popular space operas or time-travel capers. Whereas the field itself is a far broader one, something that Atwood failed to recognise or acknowledge. This recognition — with the selections inspired therein — is one of the best things about The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction , an excellent anthology published by Hachette India.

Consider the second story, Inspector Matadeen on the Moon , originally a Hindi short story (translated by CM Naim) written by Harishankar Parsai (1924-95), the undisputed king of 20th-century Hindi satire. It’s a typically Parsai farce, where the titular Inspector Matadeen, corrupt to the hilt, goes to the moon and overhauls the entire administrative set-up there. His solution for petty crime is simple — slash the salaries of policemen. “Five hundred to a constable, seven hundred to a havildar, and a thousand to a thanedaar! What sort of foolishness is this? Why should your police try to catch any criminal? In our country, we give the constables just one hundred, and the inspectors two. That’s why you see them running around catching criminals. You must reduce all salaries immediately.” Of course, Matadeen’s “solutions” import the worst of Earth’s tendencies in due course of time. Technically, this story involves a literal spaceship and a (metaphorical) monster, Atwood’s two-point criteria for “science fiction”.

Other translations in this volume, such as Muhammad Zafar Iqbal’s The Dream and Premendra Mitra’s Why the War Ended (both translated from Bangla by Arunava Sinha) are also ripostes to the traditional idea of sci-fi as a genre, as is Asif Aslam Farrukhi’s Stealing the Sea (translated by Syed Saeed Naqvi), an elegiac story that demands to be read a second time for the sake of its subtle turns of phrase. The surprise package is Rahul Sankrityayan (another Hindi titan), whose exercise in futurism, The Twenty-Second Century (translated for this volume by Maya Joshi), will stay with you long after you finish this book.

The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction; Tarun K Saint (ed.); Hachette India; Science fiction; ₹599

The other surprise element in the anthology is the number of poems — I do not recall another sci-fi anthology that featured as many as three poems. And while all three are worth returning to, the one that stayed with this writer is Arjun Rajendran’s Were It Not For , a pitch-black comedy that alludes to recent events with panache.

“Historians will forget the fishermen, their 5000 boats and black flags. The dimensions/ of the monument to the medieval warrior king is 210 metres tall and costs/ enough to fund a decade of suicides for the state’s indebted farmers — / having battled pests all their lives, it’s natural they should end theirs with pesticide.”

Which isn’t to say that the book isn’t a moment of glory for Indian science fiction’s usual suspects as well. Manjula Padmanabhan’s Flexi Time is a delightful little fable that involves a positive spin on the old joke about punctuality and ‘Indian Standard Time’ (Padmanabhan also contributes a foreword to the book, not to mention a typically madcap illustration for the inside cover flap). À la Philip K Dick’s best capers, the characters in Payal Dhar’s The Other Side use historiography to strike back against an authoritarian regime. Priya Sarukkai Chabria (whose recent novel Clone may well be one of the finest works of Indian science fiction) is similarly masterful in her story Dreaming of the Cool Green River .

Shovon Chowdhury’s The Man Who Turned Into Gandhi is a typically parodic romp through the protagonist’s misadventures — fans of Chowdhury’s writing will recognise his signature tropes of political/bureaucratic failings, along with some all-new tricks thrown in. Another memorable story, A Visit to Partition World, by Tarun K Saint (who’s also the editor of this volume) uses the “theme-park-as-microcosm” trope of modern-day literature (think Julian Barnes’s England, England or George Saunders’s CivilWarLand in Bad Decline ) in the context of the Partition, with spectacular results.

Saint has also written a very thoughtful introduction to this book, complete with over a dozen pages of bibliographic notes. Not only does the introduction do a wonderful job of contextualising the stories/poems, it also locates the work in the tradition of sci-fi anthologies in general, which makes this book unusually self-aware.

In summation, then, The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction is an instant classic, and has, dare I say it, franchise potential written all over it.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based freelance writer