Shortlisted for the British Society for Literature and Science (BSLS) Book Prize 2023
Nominated, 2023 Teaching Literature Book Award
Indian Science Fiction has evolved over the years and can be seen making a mark for itself on the global scene. Dalit speculative fiction writer and editor Mimi Mondal is the first SF writer from India to have been nominated for the prestigious Hugo award. In fact, Indian SF addresses themes such as global climate change. Debates around G.C.C are not just limited to science fiction but also permeate in critical discussions on SF.
This volume seeks to examine the different ways by which Indian SF narratives construct possible national futures. For this looking forward necessarily germinates from the current positional concerns of the nation. While some work has been done on Indian SF, there is still a perceptible lack of an academic rigor invested into the genre; primarily, perhaps, because of not only its relative unpopularity in India, but also its employment of futuristic sights. Towards the same, among other things, it proposes to study the growth and evolution of science fiction in India as a literary genre which accommodates the duality of the national consciousness as it simultaneously gazes ahead towards the future and glances back at the past. In other words, the book will explore how the tensions generated by the seemingly conflicting forces of tradition and modernity within the Indian historical landscape are realized through characteristic tropes of SF storytelling. It also intends to look at the interplay between the spatio-temporal coordinates of the nation and the SF narratives produced within to see, firstly, how one bears upon the other and, secondly, how processes of governance find relational structures with such narratives. Through these, the volume wishes to interrogate how postcolonial futures promise to articulate a more representative and nuanced picture of a contemporary reality that is rooted in a distinct cultural and colonial past.
Shweta Khilnani is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Sri Guru Tegh Bahadur Khalsa College, University of Delhi. She is a PhD scholar at the Department of English, University of Delhi and her dissertation explores the nexus between the literary, the affective and the political with respect to digital narratives. She is interested in the study of popular cultures and theories of contemporary literature. She is the co-editor of Imagining Worlds, Mapping Possibilities: Select Science Fiction Stories.
Ritwick Bhattacharjee is an assistant professor at the Department of English, Sri Guru Tegh Bahadur Khalsa College, University of Delhi, New Delhi. His research has been located around fantasy, philosophy, phenomenology, horror fiction, science fiction, Indian English novels and disability studies. He is the author of Humanity's Strings: Being, Pessimism, and Fantasy and a co-editor of Horror Fictions of the Global South: Cultures, Narratives and Representations with Saikat Ghosh, What Makes it Pop? Introduction to Studies in Popular Fiction with Srinjoyee Dutta, Science Fiction in India: Parallel Worlds and Postcolonial Paradigms with Shweta Khilnani and Reclaiming the Disabled Subject: Representing Disability in Short Fiction with Someshwar Sati and G.J.V. Prasad. He has been awarded the Prof. Meenakshi Mukherjee Memorial Award for his essay titled 'Politics of Translation: Disability, Language, and the Inbetween' published in the book Disability in Translation: The Indian Experience. His book Science Fiction in India: Parallel Worlds and Postcolonial Paradigms has been awarded the best academic book published in 2022 by the Federation of Indian Publishers and has been nominated for BLS book of the year and 2023 Idaho University Teaching Literature Book Award.
