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.
