Written by Pratik Kanjilal |Published: June 29, 2019 12:07:12 am
Tales of Future Past
Two ambitious, engaging anthologies that navigate the best that Indian science fiction has to offer
HISTORIANS STUDY the past because it illuminates the present, and writers of science fiction examine the future for precisely the same reason – it is a glass in which we see ourselves more clearly, with the benefit of foresight. But until very recent times, science fiction has flourished sporadically in India, not as a genre. Perhaps it’s because the ancients had exhausted the possibilities of the collective unconscious, and readers are satisfied with the classics in new formats, like comic books and animation films. Or perhaps because here, contemporary truth is stranger than fiction. In India, 1984 does not only recall George Orwell. As Tarun K Saint notes, the year was a real, lived-in dystopia featuring insurgency, the slaying of a prime minister, a pogrom and Bhopal’s industrial disaster.
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